Semantic Versioning in a nutshell

I made a short tweet today and it seems I hit a nerve:

Instead of Major.Minor.Patch say Breaking.Feature.Bugfix - that's #SemVer in a nutshell.

— Robert Muehsig (@robert0muehsig) 21. Juli 2015

Because I like blogging I decided to write a small blogpost about SemVer.

Why Semantic Versioning (SemVer)

In our industry we use version numbers a lot. The typical naming is MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, sometimes also MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.BUILD or instead of PATCH you could say REVISION - it is more or less the same.

But the problem is: This is not very self describing. What is MAJOR or a REVISION? When should I change the MAJOR version and when should I increase the MINOR version etc. You see: It sounds simple, but it is really complicated.

SemVer

SemVer is a pretty simple concept to give each part a better description.

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

• MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
• MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
• PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
• Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

If you change your API with breaking changes: Increase the MAJOR version. A new feature? Increase the MINOR version. Bugfix? Simple…

So in short: Breaking.Feature.Bugfix

It’s a technical solution - don’t try to get nice Marketing-Version-Numbers

SemVer is a technical solution - if you want to get great Marketing-Version-Numbers this will probably fail, so maybe you should split the “commercial” and “technical” version number.

There should also be a separate 'commercial' number so as not to interfere so V3 - 12.166.2 https://t.co/Gp61dYltkf

— Dean McDonnell (@McDonnellDean) 21. Juli 2015

Learn more

I had read the “Breaking.Feature.Bugfix” summary somewhere else (maybe from this blogpost?), but I can’t remember the original author (Kudos!), but I received this Tweet with a full talk about exactly this topic, so if you want to learn more:

@robert0muehsig @PascalPrecht Glad you like it :) The original tweet: https://t.co/QGlydUsPYg + an entire talk: https://t.co/iydJudpqYW

— Stephan Bönnemann (@boennemann) 21. Juli 2015

Well…

Just for fun:

@robert0muehsig @chrisoldwood I use node, so versioning is Unused.Breaking.Breaking ;)

— I, Dom Davis (@idomdavis) 21. Juli 2015

;)

Hope this helps!