3 ms·

So, which is the reason that takes someone to be scared about incrementing the major number?

• grey-area 14y ago
  End users expect major changes with a major number release (rightly or wrongly), so if you don't have any other than a minor breaking change, they might be annoyed. Of course if you're using semantic versioning you should probably just ignore them and increment anyway till they get used to it.
  • dragonwriter 14y ago
    > End users expect major changes with a major number release (rightly or wrongly) I think that's highly dependent on the particular market that a product is in, and how its version numbers are used in marketing. Chrome (which neither heavily markets around version numbers nor uses SemVer, but instead increments the major version number with every regularly-scheduled feature release) end-users (whether you are speaking of regular end-users or developers) probably don't have any particular expectations tied to major version bumps. Microsoft Windows (which doesn't use SemVer, but does heavily market around major versions) end-users probably have much bigger expectations for major versions, as a direct result of the vendor's marketing investments. A developer-focussed product that consistently uses SemVer and markets around particular new features rather than major version numbers probably won't have much expectation from its target users tied to major release bumps except that they will meet the SemVer definition of a major release bump.