Working with SemVer leads to two observations:

• only two version numbers are sufficient: there's no real difference between patch and minor.
• deprecate than remove cycle: using a major version only leads to the removal of deprecation warnings and their associated feature. It means bumping for 1 to 2 should works, if the version 1 does not throws warnings anymore.

how to judge the semver approach? Either describe the thing actually behaves (descriptivist) or describe about the right and wrong ways to use a particular tool (prescriptivist).

Another instance of this pattern playing out I’ve noticed are log levels. You can get very philosophical about the difference between error, warn and info. But what helps is looking at what they do:

• error pages the operator immediately.
• warn pages if it repeats frequently.
• info is what you see in the prog logs when you actively look at them.
• And debug is what your developers see when they enable extra logging.