Versioning Scheme

There are various scheme for handling version number. But so far I haven't really encountered anything meaningful in any of the schemes. several days ago I encountered scheme which I really liked.

The scheme is a variant of Change Significance and is specifically aimed for API libraries, that is while I'm sure it can be extended to regular products, its basic semantics is for aimed for API's libraries.

and the semantics goes like this (using a four digit sequence):

• a change in the first number means the API has changed in a breaking manner.
• a change in the second number means there were additions to the API
• and a change in the third number means an that the internal behavior
• Last number is a sequential build number.

Let take for example NUnit, if NUnit will adopt this scheme. When upgrading from lets say 2.4.0 to 3.0.0, I would expect that some of my existing tests will need to be updated to reflect the changes. When upgrading from 2.4.0 to 2.5.0, I would expect to see some new abilities reflected in new API's (but my existing tests should still stay valid). And last, when updating from 2.5.0 to 2.5.1 there would be some internal changes in behavior that shouldn't affect me at all.

I really liked this one when I heard it, what do you think?

Posted in: ALM,Random Thoughts,tips,tools