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Romance and Rebellion In Software Versioning

Posted by timothy on from the one-point-2-slash-b-codename-priapic-porcupine dept.

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.

2 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Semantic Versioning by bondsbw · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://semver.org/

    --
    All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  2. KISS by Moof123 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Please keep this crap simple. It is maddening for secondary tools (ones I don't use daily) to get all cutesy with the Silky Lizard release, which is also known at the 2015 release, but has an about me of 3.2.0.1 hotfix 430. Searching under all three is necessary since everyone adopts a different preferred method to refer to the dang thing.

    On the whole I greatly prefer versions that are year.month based so it is very easy to recognize how long in the tooth something is. XYZ 2015.01 tells me it is the January 2015 release.