To avoid the tick/tock cadence and the “I don’t know how years work/what years are” objection, let’s drop the year and the minor version, then, and move towards a simpler scheme:
New versioning scheme
GNOME will publish two major versions per year; each version is going to be supported for no less than 12 months.
The version scheme is: M.N
where:
Mis a monotonically increasing number, starting at 4, and incremented with every new six months cycleNis either one of these tokens:- one of
alpha,beta, orrc, followed by a monotonically increasing number, for each development release - a monotonically number, starting from 0; the number is increased by 1 for every stable release
- one of
Examples
Assuming that 3.38 (September 2020) is the last release with the old versioning scheme:
4.alpha0: the first release of the first development cycle of 2021; equivalent to 3.39.0 in the old versioning scheme4.0: the first stable release of the first development cycle of 2021; equivalent to 3.40.0 in the old versioning scheme5.beta2: the second beta release of the second development cycle of GNOME for the year 2021; equivalent to 3.41.91, in the old versioning scheme7.0: the first stable release of the second development cycle of GNOME for the year 2022; equivalent to 3.44.0, in the old versioning scheme8.9: the tenth stable release of the first development cycle of GNOME for the year 2023; equivalent to 3.46.9 in the old versioning scheme