An analysis of semver compliance in Rust finds accidental semver violations are common even in the most popular crates. Human error is not the cause, and better tooling is the way forward.
change the meaning of an existing parameter - e.g. an Integer timeout changes from seconds to milliseconds
Ideally you should change the type if you do such a thing, which would cause it to become a breaking change. In this specific instance, you should take std::time::Duration obviously.
dependency changes, and this package exposes exposes types from that dependency
I think that should be automatically detectable?
But yes you’re right, in general it’s not possible to detect all forms of semver changes. But perhaps at least detecting violations when they weren’t meant to be there would be good.
And yea 100% agree with you, people should use the power that is 2.0.0 way more than they currently do.
Ideally you should change the type if you do such a thing
But that’s not always possible or desirable. For example, maybe you’re largely just passing it through to another library, and that library made a breaking change.
So I don’t think we should have semver always handled automatically, it should instead prompt the developer with its best guess, and the developer would ideally only move from patch -> minor, patch -> major, or minor -> major, and never the other direction. But the developer should always be involved in picking the version. So don’t just throw it into CI and call it a day, but instead have a CLI tool that suggests it and requires developer approval before making the PR for the version bump.
Ideally you should change the type if you do such a thing, which would cause it to become a breaking change. In this specific instance, you should take
std::time::Durationobviously.I think that should be automatically detectable?
But yes you’re right, in general it’s not possible to detect all forms of semver changes. But perhaps at least detecting violations when they weren’t meant to be there would be good.
And yea 100% agree with you, people should use the power that is 2.0.0 way more than they currently do.
But that’s not always possible or desirable. For example, maybe you’re largely just passing it through to another library, and that library made a breaking change.
So I don’t think we should have semver always handled automatically, it should instead prompt the developer with its best guess, and the developer would ideally only move from patch -> minor, patch -> major, or minor -> major, and never the other direction. But the developer should always be involved in picking the version. So don’t just throw it into CI and call it a day, but instead have a CLI tool that suggests it and requires developer approval before making the PR for the version bump.