Snapd version numbers?

It was pointed out recently that our version numbers (2.26, 2.27) are not that very meaningful.

So what about if we follow the ubuntu version number schema and do “17.8”, “17.8.1”, “17.9” etc (corresponding to the $Year[2:].$Month) ?

would that not start confusing people by mentally tieing the version to an ubuntu release ? (i run 16.04 but somehow i got the 17.10 snapd installed (because he got the october release))

i think making it look less like an ubuntu version might be helpful here … how about 7.8 … 7.9 … 7.10 ?

The Ubuntu version number makes sense in that the meaning derived from it is “when was this released?” However, I personally don’t care about when a given snapd release was made, I care more about “does this release of snapd break compatibility with the previous release?” or “was this just a bugfix release?” In the case of a single software product as opposed to an OS, I think semantic versioning makes more sense.

So the real question is: what are we defining as “meaning” when we say “meaningful?”

That’s a good point. It would definitely create some confusion with Ubuntu releases, which are completely unrelated to the topic here. By meaningful I think we really mean it’s a monotonic increasing version, without any correlation with time.

You’re right, though, the current scheme is better in terms of having an idea of change sequence and breakages.