How to do version numbers? [closed]

Question

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!

Answer 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

Answer 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.