Semver usage in _major_ = 0

Problem

I probably missed the discussion how semver is used in this monorepo. But today I tried the following, and it took me some time to understand why it's failing:

[dependencies]
arti-client = "0.4"
tor-checkable = "0.4"
tor-circmgr = "0.4"

This had three (for me) unexpected results:

  • arti-client version 0.4.1 depends on tor-* crates with version 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5
  • tor-checkable doesn't exist in any version 0.4
  • tor-circmgr now exists with two versions in my project and conflicts with the one in arti-client's

Standard

According to semver.org, this is normal behavior:

Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.

But I still got a proposal:

Proposal

Treat the minor version of the major version 0 as a major version, in that it doesn't break the API when the only the patch version changes. So:

  • you can use 0.4 as the version in your Cargo.toml, and cargo update does the right thing
  • A crate with version 0.4.x will not depend on a crate with version 0.3.x or 0.5.x

This would make things more intuitive, as other crates also allow depending on 0.x and then having cargo update do the right thing.