A good strategy for implementing a versioning system

Question

I have been struggling with versioning software for a while now. I'm not talking about a naming convention, I'm talking about how to actually apply a version in a build system all the way through to a release.

I generally use major.minor.maintenance-[release type] i.e. 1.0.2-rc1

The problem is managing the version number. I've tried many ways (sticking it in a build file, a properties file, a database, etc,etc) but I haven't found anything that really works well.

The closest thing I came up with is using Jira which I documented here: http://blog.sysbliss.com/uncategorized/release-management-with-atlassian-bamboo-and-jira.html

I'm wondering if anyone has any good ideas about this. Also, wondering how people handle releasing a version.... i.e. If I release/deploy version 1.0.0-rc1 do bugs found in this release then get logged into 1.0.0 (the next/production release).

Answer 1

Microsoft uses <major>.<minor>.<patch>-<build number> (or a variation).

I like using <major>.<minor>.<buildnumber>