I thought the diff rormat would be more useful here.

Also, in practical terms, ever since theextra.symfony.require key was added, when you intall a Symfony package, it uses the version constraint format4.4.* not^4.4. And so, for consistency, I'm showing that format and telling people to continue using it.

Time flies!

Are we sure this is the case? (I'm on Windows atm, so I cannot test it)

If I'm readinghttps://github.com/symfony/skeleton/blob/master/composer.json correctly, the dependencies are actually marked as* and theextra.symfony.require is used to limit the scope to a specific minor version. That would mean you only need to update that value?

Yes ... that's how I've seen it in modern Symfony apps ... but the reader of this document can use any method actually, especially if they are upgrading from very old Symfony versions.

In practice, when youcompose require symfony/something, it will put theX.X.* version constraint in your composer.json file. So... I'm trying to show an example that will look "like" the user's composer.json file. But technically speaking, you're totally right: if they had^4.0 everywhere, they could upgrade/control the Symfony versionssimply by changingextra.symfony.require. But that's not how things currently will look in real apps.

I talked with Nicolas about this, and I think it (the usage theX.X.* format bycomposer require) was more-or-less an "accidental" by-product of theextra.symfony.require feature