Re: git version numbers

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 06:13:22AM +1000, Tim Mazid wrote:

I was just looking at various versioning schemes, and I came to wonder
about git's one.  Most of the ones out there are of the form
<major>.<minor>.<optional revision> (j.n.r), but git seems to have four,
as in 1.7.5.1.

So, I was wondering what you call each number in the git version; does
the usual j.n.r apply to the last three and the first one is a
"mystery"?  What is the official versioning scheme?  Does each number
have any particular name?

In "git w.x.y.z", the decoding is:

  w: not likely to change short of a complete rewrite or something that
     is quite incompatible (i.e., will probably remain "1" for quite a
     while)

  x: when this jumps, it is a "big" version change, meaning there may be
     some minor incompatibilities or new ways of doing things. For
     example, 1.5.0 introduced a lot of usability changes and the
     separate-remotes layout became the default. In 1.6.0, we stopped
     shipping "git-*" in the PATH, and started using some new packfile
     features by default. And so on. If you want to know more, see
     Documentation/RelNotes/1.?.0.txt.

  y: when this jumps, it is a new release cut from master that does not
     have any "big" changes as above. There will be new features and
     some bugfixes. See RelNotes/1.7.?.txt for examples of what gets
     included.

  z: when this jumps, it is a bugfix release based on the feature
     release w.x.y. See RelNotes/1.7.5.?.txt for examples.

Getting more to your actual question, I don't know that we ever use any
particular name like "major" or "minor" for any of them. We do tend to
use the terms "feature release" for w.x.y releases and "bugfix release"
for w.x.y.z.

-Peff