“Madame Semver Will See You Now”: A Wry Take on Semantic Versioning

The nesbitt.io blog has published a post with a telling title — “Madame Semver Will See You Now” — a nod to the signs of fortune-tellers who promise a glimpse into the future.

The author draws a parallel between semantic versioning (semver) and fortune-telling: a version number is supposedly meant to predict what will happen when you update a dependency — whether breaking changes will appear, whether backward compatibility will hold. But, like a fortune-teller's predictions, these promises don't always come true in practice.

The specifics of the piece itself — the concrete examples, arguments and the author's conclusions — aren't spelled out in the announcement we received, so it would be improper to paraphrase them. Judging by the headline and the tone, it's a critical but tongue-in-cheek look at how the developer community treats version numbers as an almost magical instrument that relieves them of responsibility for checking compatibility.

The topic of semantic versioning regularly sparks debate in the open source community: some see it as a useful convention that makes life easier when updating packages, while others see it as a source of false security that makes developers less likely to read the changelog and test updates by hand.

Materials like this serve as a reminder: a version number is a signpost, not a guarantee, and you shouldn't rely on it entirely.

Source: Lobsters