[Bf-committers] Use of semantic versioning

[Mick Lawitzke]

Hey guys,

it is really awesome to see the latest development of Blender. I am super impressed and hyped for what is coming. Anyway i think there is a big flaw that also results in a problem with marketing: Your versioning numbers suggest that 2.80 is just a minor update to 2.79 and people call it 2.8 (eight) instead of 2.80 (eighty).

I am a software developer for 15 years now and i highly recommend you to use semantic versioning:

- Current version is Blender 2.79 but what if you do bugfixes on 2.79, you would not call it 2.80 right? A better approach would be to call it 2.79.0 and then a bugfix makes it 2.79.1. The current latest version might be 2.79.102 if there were 102 patches on that version.
- The next version would be 2.80.0. But since you worked 3 years on that and introduce so many awesome improvements and changes this is a major update and would introduce Blender 3.0.0 (Or short just Blender 3).

From marketing perspective a "Blender 3" would have a much bigger impact than just an update from "2.79" to "2.80" which is also incorrectly called "2.8", too.

Is is correct that semantic versioning is described for libraries/frameworks ( https://semver.org/ <https://semver.org/> ), but you could easily adapt it to end-user software: 
MAJOR version when you do a totally revamped UI, big-ass new features or huge performance-improvements
MINOR version when you add new features or do big improvements that can be promoted on the website
PATCH version when you make bug fixes or tiny improvements that don't change the UI or introduce new features.

In addition to that i just wanted to mention, that some big projects skipped a version to make the latest update even more obvious:

- Windows jumped from 8 to 10
- PHP jumped from 5 to 7

This could be an option for Blender, too, to improve the marketing even further: Jump from 2.79 to Blender 4. But in my opinion a jump to 3 would already do the job.

Greetings

Mick