go-semver-oracle compares two versions of software and computes a lower bound
on the semantic versioning difference between them.
This project combines two of my petty peeves:
-
Prefixing the names of Golang projects with 'go'
If I have a point with this, beyond curmudgery, it’s that the semantic versions are consistently underestimated and that almost all such version bumps should be major ones.
This software can only ever compute a lower bound on semantic version difference because of the halting problem. To take a less dramatic example, consider the following package:
package foo
func Bar() *int { x := 1729; return &x }
If we change this package to
package foo
func Bar() *int { return nil }
the oracle will report only a patch version bump, but the behavior of the
package has arguably changed in a non-backwards-compatible way (the invariant
foo.Bar() != nil broke), so it should get a major version bump.
One can come up with less contrived examples, but the larger point is that static analysis can only infer so much about the runtime behavior of a system, so our computations will always be based on a subset of the effective changes between versions. Thus we can only say that the software changed at least this much between versions.