On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:20 PM, wren ng thornton
For projects which are released very frequently (i.e. on the order of daily) or very infrequently (e.g. semiannually, annually) then date-based releases can make sense. However, the releases do need to be quite regular on either of those time scales. This style is also appropriate for projects which exist in-time with our non-code world.
Often though, projects see sporadic flurries of improvements and so something that's been languishing for months can quickly make a couple bugfix releases followed by a backwards-incompatible rewrite in the same week, only to languish for a while afterwards. With this sort of release pattern, date-based versions make no sense whatsoever since the calendar makes rather arbitrary cliffs in the topology.
For most projects the Major.Minor.Bug style seems to work better, but I have seen projects where the YYYY.MM.DD style is more appropriate.
I went with the Major.Minor.YYYY.MM.DD because I'm too lazy to increment bug-fix version numbers, and the code I have building the .cabal file already knows today's date. I guess that approach doesn't work too well if you're not machine generating your .cabal file, or if you expect more than one bug-fix release per day. -Antoine