[RFC] Move to month-based (semantic) versioning

[phlax]

There have been various discussions historically about rethinking our versioning

Essentially - as we are unlikely to ever create a 2.x.x version - the preceding "1." is superfluous

The 2 proposals that have been considered:

• bump minor -> major - so eg next version would 31.0 rather than 1.31.0
• use date-based versions - so on the basis that the next release happens in 2024/04, the next version would be 202404.0

personally, im not opposed to date-based versions (as long as they are semantic)

a concern is that version is not strictly associated to the date - so patch releases in this schema would be 202404.x, but might be actually released a year later

if we make any change to this it will require quite a bit of work to update/fix release tooling - not a huge amount, but significant

i think the main advantage of date-based versions is that they carry more information, with possible downside of being misleading for later patches

[phlax]

~i think im more inclined towards non-date versions~

would be good to get some community feedback on this

once we have decided a way forward i think we need to blast it out on all channels to avoid some of the issues that other projects have faced when changing version schemas

[phlax]

cc @ggreenway @mattklein123

[ggreenway]

I always get annoyed because I have no idea when 1.28 was released; the timeframe gives me more of a sense of what was in the release.

If we do date-based versions, I think leaving off the day, so that it is , makes it simpler to do the release (doesn't matter if the date moves by one day), doesn't care about timezones anymore, and still carries enough information about when it was released.

I think we could document that the major version of eg 202404 means that the initial release on this stable branch was in april 2024. The initial release would be 202404.0, subsequent bugfixes are 202404.1, 202404.2, etc.

[phlax]

yeah - agree - month-based mitigates some of my concerns

[mattklein123]

+1 for month based date versions.

[phlax]

updated the ticket title/description to reflect this - im pretty won over to month-based tbh

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