A question on semver stability

Hi folks!

I am currently on a mission to reduce the number of breaking changes across the rust-libp2p ecosystem. One of the fundamental dependencies of libp2p are PeerIds and Multiaddr. Both of them depend on the Multihash type defined here: https://github.com/multiformats/rust-multihash.

That type comes with the scale-codec feature which brings this crate into its dependency tree.

You might see where this is going. With parity-scale-codec in our public API, any breaking change in this crate triggers a breaking change in pretty much every crate across the rust-libp2p ecosystem.

I have two questions:

• Do you have a policy on semver stability? For example, at most 1 breaking change every 2 years etc.
• I see that the custom-derive for parity-scale-codec has an encode_as attribute. Is this equivalent to serde(with)? Would it be acceptable to remove parity-scale-codec as a dependency from multihash and move the Multihash implementation to an adapter crate where users then have to use the encode_as feature of the derive?

Thanks in advance! :)

Start by reviewing the public API's use of parity-scale-codec and the custom derive's encode_as attribute, then follow the linked multihash issue for ecosystem context. Done means the semver policy and the proposed adapter-crate approach have been evaluated and a clear decision is documented.