Semver is unlikely to help because the question is what is "broken" by
a change in version. Semver would likely be about breaking changes to
internal org apis, not changes to default behavior that affect users,
so you have two different "semantics" which put us right back where we
are now -- to know what really changed you have to read the NEWS.
Bastien has also talked about hear-ye versioning, which says when a
version changes users need to read the news. Best,
Tom


On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 1:15 PM gyro funch <gyromagnetic@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/16/2020 9:26 AM, Tom Gillespie wrote:
> > Would it help if major releases maintained a mini-config that if added
> > to init.el would allow users to retain old behavior? That way they
> > wouldn't have to read the NEWS but could just add the relevant lines,
> > or maybe even just call the org-old-default-behavior-9.1 or
> > org-old-default-behavior-9.4. The workflow during development would be
> > to account for any change to defaults in those functions. Thoughts?
> > Tom
> >
> >
>
> I hate to open a new can of worms, but could semantic versioning be used
> such that it is obvious when there are changes that are not backwards
> compatible?
>
> -gyro
>
>