Re: I'd like to help kill off some man(1) hacks

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 04:39:32PM -0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> On 8/24/20, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If we can get the PS-and-PDF-font-embedding situation worked out, maybe
> > that would merit a version bump to 1.23,
> 
> Does GNU in general, or groff in particular, have hard and fast rules
> about what level of change warrants bumping which element of the
> version number?  The next groff release will already change the
> interpretation of some undelimited \s arguments (commit 0b9aaca0),
> which has the potential to affect some back compatibility.  By the
> strictest reading of the rules of semantic versioning
> (http://semver.org/), this requires bumping the major version number.

groff hasn't generally done semver for this sort of relatively limited
potential compatibility break, but I certainly think we shouldn't be
scared of bumping the minor number.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson@debian.org]