Context: I recently found out about Semantic Versioning, and am trying to determine how to best use it practically for my own projects.
Given that semver takes major changes, minor changes, and patches into account for versioning, when should a commit not be tagged with an updated version? It seems to me that every change would fit into one of these categories, and so every change should be versioned, but when I look at various popular projects on GitHub this doesn't seem to be the way things are done (just looking at the fact that large projects have tens of thousands of commits, with only hundreds of tags).
Best Answer
SemVer concerns versioning releases, not commits. If your version control model happens to require that every commit to master be a release, then yes, every commit will need to be tagged according to the degree of the change.
Generally, though, projects develop a mostly stable product on master and tag the releases they deem worthy of support. When they do so, they will tag according to their versioning scheme, which doesn't necessarily have to be SemVer in particular.