How to do version numbers? [closed]
My company is building a product. It's going to be versioned by SVN. It's a webapp so basically there will never be a version out which doesn't have some features in them and thus could always be labeled as beta. But since it's going to be a corporate product I really don't want the "unstable watchout" on there. So how would you go about versioning? Is 1.0 stable? Should the build date be in the version number? Tell me what you guys think!
Solution 1:
[major].[minor].[release].[build]
major: Really a marketing decision. Are you ready to call the version 1.0? Does the company consider this a major version for which customers might have to pay more, or is it an update of the current major version which may be free? Less of an R&D decision and more a product decision.
minor: Starts from 0 whenever major is incremented. +1 for every version that goes public.
release: Every time you hit a development milestone and release the product, even internally (e.g. to QA), increment this. This is especially important for communication between teams in the organization. Needless to say, never release the same 'release' twice (even internally). Reset to 0 upon minor++ or major++.
build: Can be a SVN revision, I find that works best.
Examples
My current chrome: 83.0.4103.61
Solution 2:
x.y.z.g
increments in g are unstable. (or RCs)
increments in z are stable and mean bug fixes.
increments in y are stable and mean new features.
increments in x are stable, major release without 100% backward compatibility.
Solution 3:
I once wrote an elaborate "versioning style guide" for a large project of mine. The project failed to materialize, but the style guide is still available online. It's my personal opinion, perhaps it is helpful (or inspirational) to you.
Beware, it's a long text, and goes into component versioning vs. product versioning and stuff like that. It also expresses strong opinions on some versioning schemes popular in the OSS community, but I have them, so I express them. ;-)
I disagree with using the Subversion revision number, for example. You might want to maintain a released version while continuing development in TRUNK, so you'll set up a maintenance branch - and your revision number versioning goes down the drain.
Edit: As a summary, it distinguishes between versioning source files, components, and the overall product. It uses a system of seperate x.y versoning for components and the product, with a nice interdependency between the two that makes tracing which component version belongs to which product version trivial. It also talks about how to handle alpha / beta / release / patch cycles without breaking the system. Actually, it's a modus operandi for the whole development cycle, so you might want to cherry-pick. ;-)
Edit 2: As enough people found my article useful to make this a "Nice Answer", I started working on the article again. PDF and LaTeX versions are now available, a complete rewrite including better language and explanatory graphics will follow as soon as I can find the time. Thank you for your votes!
Solution 4:
Get yourself some inspiration from Wikipedia: "Software versioning"
Another "new" and "relatively popular" option is Semantic Versioning
Summary:
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
- MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
- MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
- PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.
Solution 5:
a.b.c.d
Increments : when
- d: bug fixes
- c: maintenance, e.g. performance improvement
- b: new features
- a: architecture change
The mandatory is the most left one e.g. if there are for example a new feature and a bug fixed then you only have to increment b.