It seems to me that they bumped the major version for every breaking change in the changelog. I guess that is in strict compliance with semantic versioning but indeed it looks strange.
After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0
There's absolutely no reason for 2 major bumps 11 days apart.
That means you need to postpone the breaking changes for a while, kind of bunching them together. Many projects do that, but it also incurs some cost.
> After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0
It's possible that they did not implement semantic changes in the strict sense before and included small breaking changes into non-major releases (I think a lot of software does this). Fast changes of version numbers may just mean they started reflecting each small BC break into the version number.
I don't know when semantic versioning was invented, but it only became prominent in the last decade. Graphviz is from the 90s.
Still, it's great to see new maintainers with bold ideas.
“The version number conveys whether there is a breaking change” seems more important than “the version number remains small”, so while the second half may be true, I don’t see how that supports the first half at all.
Is version 465 very different from version 464 though?