Semantic Versioning

[Jensen, Aaron]

Have you given any thought to adopting semantic versioning for deciding Mercurial's version numbers?  From http://semver.org: 

    Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

     1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
     2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
     3. PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

    Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

It's really helpful, as someone responsible for making sure we stay as up-to-date as possible on our tools, to know how disruptive a new release of software will be. With semantic versioning, I can compare the version I've got with the version I want to upgrade to and get a pretty good idea how safe it is to upgrade, and what level of testing I need to do.

I'd love to see Mercurial adopt semantic versioning.