Names for libraries serve a dual purpose: they must be resolvable by computers (i.e. package managers, linkers, etc) but also meaningful to humans -- the progra

Names for libraries serve a dual purpose: they must be resolvable by computers (i.e. package managers, linkers, etc) but also meaningful to humans -- the programmers who supply the name as user input in the first place. Version numbers allow one to trace the provenance of later artifacts back to earlier ones somewhat linearly, instead of having to hunt for comparable artifacts unconnected by graph edges. If libraries upon major version changes were renamed instead, the programmer would have to maintain a mental mapping between the predecessor library and the successor, and all code and configuration references to the other artifact would have to be updated 'by hand', without assistance to be gained from the package manager. Including multiple versions of a library in your project is unsupported in many environments, so if the library author ever envisions a situation where the two 'versions' will be used concurrently, renaming makes sense. In the Java ecosystem, this approach was used for Apache Commons Lang, Apache HTTP Client, and Jackson. Semantic versioning has good intentions, but adherence and accuracy of the signalling is variable. Absent external enforcement, that's just the way it is -- it's a self-asserted string that no one bothers to validate and everyone hopes they can rely on. If package repositories were more than just storage, perhaps this would be a different story. It's strange to extoll the virtues of Go's dependency management, because by convention it binds the artifact identity to a resolvable external URL without any indirection. Meatspace maintenance changes like changing the hosting location of the artifact will cause Go to treat it as a different package, and inability to directly communicate externally will also break your build. Every other packaging solution has independently come to the conclusion that abstracting away artifact identity from artifact location is a good thing, but to each their own.