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But at that point what you're doing has no resemblance to semver. And there is nothing at all wrong with that!

Just don't call it semver, because if you do, people will expect it to be... y'know... semver.

The same applies to putting your not-semver version number into places where people or tools expect a semver number to be placed. If you encounter those places (like npm) please put an actually-semver number in them.

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I don’t call it semver, I publish it to npm with this version number.

The fact that npm install automatically adds a ^ next to the version number has caused so many issues in the past where some deep dependency would push a patch, not following semver, and break a huge part of the end users.

Thankfully, yarn lockfiles were introduced and solved the problem. Only people adding the dependency for the first time would see the new behavior, which is usually fine.

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