I saw an issue today on a fairly popular project (better-auth, see the link to the issue attached). No repro, no context, just a wall of caps and profanity ending in “fuck you”. The maintainers ship this for free. People run production businesses on top of it, for free. And the thanks is someone raging into a text box because a minor bump cost them an afternoon.
I maintain and contribute to a few projects myself, so this hits a nerve a bit. Something people don’t see from the outside: it’s not enough to know how to build the thing. You also have to know how to defuse a thread where someone’s insulting you and not fire back, even though most of us aren’t paid for any of it, let alone the work of staying civil while being told to get fucked.
I’m not pretending breaking changes don’t cause real pain (that’s what the issue is about). But I keep coming back to a boundary question: if you’re not paying for it, do you actually get to demand anything? (Obviously yes, but we still need some boundaries)
If the versioning has no meaning, or conflicts with a widely held standard, why not switch to datever? Then we at least know how out of date we are…
I ask the inverse. Why should you demand that every project that uses x.y.z versioning be a semver? A widely held standard only applies if you actually want to follow it in the first place. You know HTTP spec didn’t mention anything about the body in GET requests and so almost every web server just ignores body on GET? Yeah, some software decided to use that. And guess what? That software? It was Elasticsearch. People are free to do whatever they want with their software. If they decided to publish something non standard and you decided to use it, you can ask them nicely to follow standard, or make an adapter for it.