Semantic Versioning for Dummies
Recently, I wrote a post about things developers say and what they mean. I had a lot of fun writing it and enjoyed the comments that the post generated. There are a lot more things that I wanted to write about and I plan on doing a follow-up post in the future with more things, but there was one bit of lingo that I felt deserved more than a single paragraph explanation: Semver.
What is Semver? Semver is short for semantic versioning. Semantic Versioning is a standardized way to give meaning to your software releases. It’s a way for software authors to communicate succinctly to the consumers of their software important info they should know about this release.
Semver is represented by just three numbers separated by periods. For example, the current version of lodash, as of the publication date of this post, is 4.17.11, which you can find at their github or npm profile page. With this number I can easily tell all the compatibility information I need and can make decisions on if I should upgrade to the latest revision and how much work that may take to do that.
Each number is a different level of revision, depending on what was changed in the revision. Reading from left to write the number represents the current Major release, the current Minor release of the current Major release, and the current Patch release of the current Minor…
