[kergonath]

> That's such a cynical take. The 'manifesto' or the standard is important for two reasons:

I don’t object to the RFC at all. I don’t like it for several reasons, but it has a purpose and it is useful to other people. The points you mention are right. I would just add the caveat that I haven’t seen any real improvement in versioning schemes. Most projects, which were already close, follow it and a bunch of high-profile ones don’t at all, exactly like before.

What irks me a little is the idea that it’s normal for Ubuntu to do its thing because we did not have the concepts behind semver (“I remember being confused about how to version code until I encountered semver (Ubuntu scheme was the one I used for a short while). It's possible that Canonical was faced with a similar choice and decided to make one up”), but please let me know if I misunderstood.

Ubuntu’s scheme was clever and justified, but not because the alternative was mysterious. It was great to new versions being released at a specific point in time rather than when new features or breaking changes were ready. It was also quirky at the time, along with their animal codenames, and it helped them being seen as a new, modern distribution. But GCC, as an example of very high profile free software, has been more or less following semantic versioning principles since the 1980s. And as a teenager learning to code and immersed in the Open Source culture in the late 1990s, I can say that we knew perfectly well what was basically semver without the legalese.