Is changing an error message in a package a breaking change?

In general I recommend looking to TensorFlows documentation on what they consider to be a breaking change

In particular they exclude:

  • Changing the type of exception thrown, unless the docs specified that that function threw that type of exception.** (which is even stronger than changing the message. They are allowed to change the type).
  • Changing something from throwing a exception to returning the correct result, even if it was documented that it would throw an exception. (so functionality is allowed to be added)
  • Return value of floating point operations. You can rely only on accuracy saying the same, not exact value.
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