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Will this be considered a breaking change according to the SemVer conventions?

No - the functionality of the library is identical between this version and the previous one - just how it's built has changed.

This change happened in a patch release, so the serde author either did not consider it breaking, or doesn't follow semver in the first place.

Most crates do not raise their major version when increasing the minimum supported rust version. So there is precedence for treating which changes can break for some people, but which don't have a breaking API changes, as non-breaking for semver purposes.

Correct, serde does not follow semver.

What rule of semver does it break.

I'm not sure if he's made an official statement about his versioning policy, but if you look at https://crates.io/users/dtolnay?sort=downloads, you can see that most of his crates follow the incremental patch versioning style.

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