

I don’t think there’s any room to argue that announcing a 1.x with a change the developers say is a breaking change, which is what Immich have done, fits within the semver.org guidelines.
That wasn’t the argument.
Following semver is optional. If a project doesn’t explicitly state it is following semver, it shouldn’t be assumed that it is. With regard to Immich in particular, a cursory review of their documentation makes it clear that they are not following semver. Literally, go to https://immich.app/ and read the text at the very top of the page:
⚠️ The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes.
Go to the repo and you’ll see the README, which states at the very top:
- ⚠️ The project is under very activedevelopment.
- ⚠️ Expect bugs and breaking changes.
If you can read that, see that they’re on major version 1 with a minor version over 100, and you still think they’re using semver, then that’s on you.
The devs have stated they won’t be using semver until they consider Immich production ready, and that moving to a 1.x version from 0.x was a mistake made some time ago. If you want to think about it as though it is semver, consider the major version to still be 0. See https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/5086#discussioncomment-7593227 for example.
As this project is clearly not following semver, the semver guidelines aren’t applicable and haven’t been violated.
I don’t think there’s any room to argue
Even if semver were applicable, in this case, I would still disagree. The text from semver.org states:
8. Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backward incompatible changes are introduced to the public API.
It doesn’t state that any backward incompatible changes, period, require a major version increase, only changes to the public API. I would personally argue that the deployment configuration is part of the public API, but not all project owners agree with me. Even if they do agree, they might say that this was not a documented deployment configuration and thus not part of the public API, and that it therefore doesn’t necessitate an increase to the major version, but as they knew that people were using that configuration, anyway, they included a note about a potentially breaking change as a courtesy to those users.
Claiming that GTA is responsible for mass shootings is an example of what pro-gun activists do in order to deflect the blame off of guns.