I know I’m not convincing anyone here, but here’s how I see it:
- Epoch SemVer does not seem to tackle the nastiest problem and you outlined it well: how do we not do a major version bump if we changed 1-2 functions? (This of course assumes we had to and it was not a capricious whim.)
Why do you want to avoid a major bump? With Epoch SemVer you can embrace major bumps while at the same time communicating you are still in an experimental phase (e.g. v0_014). Sure, most tools would display that as v14, but as long as you make it clear in your readme, like with your disclaimer, that wont be a problem.
Then, when you’ve reached stability you can publish v1_000 and from then on make the same stability promises as you would when reaching traditional v1.
At this point you probably do want to avoid too many major bumps, but instead of going from v1 to v2 to v3, you might instead go from v1_000 to v1_001 to v1_002 to v2_000, as that might provide the smoother upgrade journey to users and at the same time better communicate that there weren’t too many major changes up until v2_000
Also, if you’re hardcore about backwards compatibility like @mudasobwa then you can just stay on v1_000.x forever, that would be a pretty good promise!
