The wonders of semantic versioning

Many years ago, in the dim and distant past, I used to work for Prime Computer Inc. They don't exist any more. They had a very good policy when it came to versions of their operating system. They used the familar major.minor.fix convention for denoting the version but were very strict about what this meant. The version numbers were always numbers, never strings, and you could and were supposed to infer things from the numbers. These inferences told you what versions were compatible with what other versions. They also told you about scale and kind of changes between versions. Sadly the industry as a whole doesn't do any of this in general. In fact, until recently, Prime was the only case I knew of that ever did this properly. Then I came across something called Semantic Versioning. See the web site at http://semver.org. This describes exactly what was done at Prime. How jolly sensible. Let's hope this catches on.