Git fork version etiquette [closed]

Question

When I fork someone else's project on GitHub, update the files, and update my own fork, how do I version my fork?

For example, the original project is version 1.2.3, and I add a minor bug fix. Would I change the version of my fork to 1.2.4? Or would I start over with version 1 since it's essentially a separate project?

Is there a standard for this or is it personal preference?

Answer 1

If your fork is intended to become its own project, feel free to use whatever versioning you wish.

However, if you intend your fork to follow the original repository closely (i.e. you plan to regularly merge updates from the original into your fork), it may make sense to base your version numbers on the upstream project's. This is an easy way to show what upstream version your software is based on.

The FreeNAS project, for example, uses major versioning based on the version of FreeBSD on which it is based. The current 9.2 version of FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD 9. If a new version based on FreeBSD 9 is released, it will likely be called version 9.3. If a new version comes out sometime in the future based on FreeBSD 10, it will likely be FreeNas 10.0.

You may want to incorporate minor releases from upstream into your version number as well, but this depends on your needs and on the versioning strategy of the upstream repository.