Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReleaseCandidat | Hacker News Reader

> Yes

Only if your version is greater than or equal to 1. Before that, you can do what you want.

   Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at
   any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.

https://semver.org/#spec-item-4

View on HN

It should be noted that Cargo (the Rust package manager) has slightly stricter requirements here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/semver.html

> Initial development releases starting with "0.y.z" can treat changes in "y" as a major release, and "z" as a minor release. "0.0.z" releases are always major changes. This is because Cargo uses the convention that only changes in the left-most non-zero component are considered incompatible.

This makes it more useful for OSS that never seem to reach 1.0.

But `can treat` is not a requirement but a suggestion. This is exactly the same as semver's 'all bets are off'.

In Cargo it's not merely a suggestion, but actual implemented behavior. Cargo takes the first non-zero number as the major incompatible version, and this influences dependency resolution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com