A Drift from Versioning to Semantic Versioning

Abstract

With change being the inherent property of each system, it becomes indispensable to keep the information base of the system state-of-the-art. With the dynamic requirements, systems are frequently upgraded and different versions of the software are retained in the repository to support historical queries. Versioning is not a new concept in the field of software engineering but nowadays there is a drift from just versioning to semantic versioning As SemVer is being adopted worldwide for versioning different software systems, it makes dependency hell a thing of the past and solves two problems of version lock and version promiscuity. This paper reveals the importance of associating well defined semantics with the versioning schemes to make users, either providers or consumers of the software clear about the dependency/compatibility issues. In this paper, the importance of SemVer has been conversed. The most important thing is to declare the piece of software as a public API in order to use semantic versioning otherwise associating meaning with the versioning scheme would be of no use.