Deciding on version numbers

Question

DUPLICATE

How to do version numbers?

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Hello,

So I recently saw that Groovy was released to version 1.6

Answer 1

Distinguish between versioning for marketing and versioning for technical use.

For marketing, the answer is: "Whatever you want your customers to think." In that case, a "major new version" should probably be accompanied by a major version number.

Also be aware that careful customers will be hesitant to use "major" new releases until time has passed and they've tried it in a test environment. A "build change" release is perceived as having bug fixes and other minor things that don't require much process to install.

For technical use, the answer is: "Whatever information you want to encode for developers." There's no one correct way to do this; it depends on your goals.

Perhaps a "major" version means "significant changes that might mean lots of new bugs." Perhaps a new "build" number happens on every single compile. Perhaps nightly build tags by date are your version. You can base it on time, Scrum cycles, milestones, features, whatever!