Simon Willison’s Weblog

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4 posts tagged “semantic-versioning”

2025

If your library doesn't have any documentation, it can't have any bugs.

Documentation specifies what your code is supposed to do. Your tests specify what it actually does.

Bugs exist when your test-enforced implementation fails to match the behavior described in your documentation. Without documentation a bug is just undefined behavior.

If you aim to follow semantic versioning you bump your major version when you release a backwards incompatible change. Such changes cannot exist if your code is not comprehensively documented!

Inspired by a half-remembered conversation I had with Tom Insam many years ago.

# 22nd May 2025, 1:55 am / testing, semantic-versioning, documentation

2021

The thing about semver major version numbers are that they don't mean new stuff, they're a permanent reminder of how many times you got the API wrong. Semver doesn't mean MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, it means FAILS.FEATURES.BUGS

Will McGugan

# 6th August 2021, 4:17 pm / semantic-versioning, versioning, will-mcgugan

2019

sqlite-utils 1.0. I just released sqlite-utils 1.0, with a couple of handy new features over 0.14: it can now automatically add columns to a database table if you attempt to insert data which doesn’t quite fit (using alter=True in the Python API or the --alter option to the “sqlite-utils insert” command). It also has the ability to output nested JSON column values on the command-line using the new --json-cols option. This is the first project I’ve marked as a 1.0 release in a very long time—I’ll be sticking to semver for this project from now on, bumping the major version only in the case of a backwards incompatible change.

# 25th May 2019, 1:20 am / projects, semantic-versioning, sqlite, versioning, sqlite-utils

2009

Semantic Versioning. Tom Preston-Werner provides a name, specification and URL describing the relatively widely used Major.Minor.Patch versioning system. This is really useful—by giving something a name and a spec, people can say “this project uses semantic versioning” and skip having to explain their backwards compatibility policy in full.

# 15th December 2009, 9:53 pm / naming-things, open-source, semantic-versioning, software, tom-preston-werner, versioning