I wouldn’t want to force any particular versioning scheme on any particular developer, but maybe the “SemVer façade” versioning scheme they switched to is the best compromise. It has defensive value, at least.
Then again, PEP 440 has nothing to say about the semantics of versioning, only requiring:
[N!]N(.N)*[{a|b|rc}N][.postN][.devN]
PyPA themselves describe various expected versioning schemes, but listing Semantic as preferred[1]. If I squint, I can fit `cryptography`’s previous scheme into “Hybrid”. The biggest lesson I take from this is that if your version scheme isn’t SemVer, work hard to make it look obviously different from SemVer.
Would SemVer even strictly require a jump here? They didn't change what's usually thought of as the API of the library (i.e. if I don't compile it myself I don't really notice the change?), and that's what SemVer uses: "MAJOR version when they make incompatible API changes,"
I can’t think of a clean alternative other than coming full-circle back to the “developer advocacy” solution, with its clear problems. Someone smarter than I am probably has it in the palm of their hand, though.
On the other hand, from what I understand they do ship precompiled wheels for many platforms, just missed one lots of people use in their CI setups (Alpine, which uses musl and thus isn't compatible with other Linux wheels - personally I think that's an odd choice but whatever, people do it)? Easy to imagine that many more people compiled it than they expected.
I wouldn’t want to force any particular versioning scheme on any particular developer, but maybe the “SemVer façade” versioning scheme they switched to is the best compromise. It has defensive value, at least.
Then again, PEP 440 has nothing to say about the semantics of versioning, only requiring:
PyPA themselves describe various expected versioning schemes, but listing Semantic as preferred[1]. If I squint, I can fit `cryptography`’s previous scheme into “Hybrid”. The biggest lesson I take from this is that if your version scheme isn’t SemVer, work hard to make it look obviously different from SemVer.[1]: https://packaging.python.org/guides/distributing-packages-us...