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semver

Important

This is still under active development and should not be considered stable. It's not even semantically versioned yet.

Semver is a project about automating semantic versioning by analysing structural and behavioural aspects of source code.

Problems with maintaining semver today

TODO: describe why semver can be hard to maintain today.

  • Hard to maintain if a project has many contributors or high commit frequency
  • Process is often manuel, relying on reviewers or structured commit messages

How can we improve

There are two aspects in doing semantic versioning the first is structural and the second is behavioural.

Structural change can be detected by comparing the abstract syntax three (ast) of an earlier version with latest version. By doing this it is possible to detect if the latest version contain structural changes and to categorize them as either a patch, minor or major change.

Behavioural change can be achieved by running the previous versions test suite against the latest version. It is important to mention that the behavioural verification requires a good test suite and coverage. It is up to the maintainer to ensure that there is enough test coverage to verify that the behavioural aspects hasn't changed between versions. And even with the best test suite you wont be able to guarentee that it wont be breaking be aware of this!

Install

Install latest version of semver.

go install github.com/quartercastle/semver/cmd/semver@latest

Usage

Semver can only do structural change detection at the moment. To use it checkout two versions of a project in different folders and use the semver cli to see the structural changes between the versions.

semver --explain path/to/v1.0.0 path/to/v2.0.0

Below is an example of the output produced by comparing v1.4.0 to the latest commit a60cdb4 of the nmea parser module for Go.

semver --filter major --explain nmea/v1.4.0 nmea/a60cdb4
MAJOR: value spec has changed signature
nmea/v1.4.0/mtk.go:5:2
- TypeMTK = "PMTK"
nmea/a60cdb4/mtk.go:6:2
+ TypeMTK = "MTK001"

MAJOR: type spec has changed signature
nmea/v1.4.0/dbs.go:10:6
- DBS struct {
	DepthFeet       float64
	DepthMeters     float64
	DepthFathoms    float64
}
nmea/a60cdb4/dbs.go:14:6
+ DBS struct {
	DepthFeet       float64
	DepthFeetUnit   string
	DepthMeters     float64
	DepthMeterUnit  string
	DepthFathoms    float64
	DepthFathomUnit string
}

MAJOR 28.070333ms

Next steps

  • Integrate with Git to automatically checkout and cache versions to compare.
  • Extract test cases from previous versions and run them against the latest version.
  • Better diffs
  • Better docs explaining why certain changes are breaking.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.