Romance and Rebellion In Software Versioning

joabj writes: Most software releases more or less follow the routine convention of Major.Minor.Bugfix numbering (i.e. Linux 4.2.1). This gives administrators an idea of what updates are major ones and might bring compatibility issues. As Dominic Tarr points out in his essay "Sentimental Versioning," a few projects boldly take on more whimsical schemes for versioning, such as Donald Knuth's use of successive Pi digits to enumerate new updates to TeX, or Node.js's punk-rock careening between major and minor releases. If you break convention, Tarr seems to be arguing, at least do so with panache.

Comments

Sofware versions should stop at 10 . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Some can go up to eleven, but most should stop at 10.

Use Gödel numbering

[vikingpower]

Use one series of primes for major.
Use a second series of primes for minor.
Use a third series of primes for patches/micro/bug fixing.

The three sets of primes should be disjoint.

For each release, multiply major with minor with micro. That is your unique version number.

You may add some sugar by adding powers of these primes for various locales, database compatibility etc. etc.