[emergentcypher]

> Version numbers are for marketing and legal.

This this this this this. This.

I've been burned by not doing this in the past with a boss who liked to make huge jumps and changes to version numbers without telling his devs, and then not being able to reproduce a given build.

Take a look at the versioning/about screens of some major software, and you'll often see these internal build numbers which have nothing to do with the shiny new "Version 2.0" that's on the branding.

Marketing can call it a Totally New Name v10, to us it's all just config values applied to build #12345.

[lucozade]

I used to work at a startup where the CEO would make us do big major, random version jumps to make the products appear more mature.

I was occasionally tasked with gently telling a client that they didn't need to mobilise the world as the only changes to their version of the code were a few minor bug fixes. How they laughed. Not.

I, semi-seriously, suggested that, if we didn't give formal meaning to the versions, we should do client specific versioning: we sent them the release notes and they could decide whether it was minor or breaking and how much integration testing would be needed.

That way everyone could play along. Never took off.

[galfarragem]

Sublime text follows this approach:

http://www.sublimetext.com/3

However Semver is useful for dependency managing.