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'

• Semantic versioning

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:

If we change this package to

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.

This software is licensed under the GPLv3. See LICENSE for a copy.