Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique ''version names'' or unique ''version numbers'' to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category (e.g., major or minor), these numbers are generally assigned in increasing order and correspond to new developments in the software. At a fine-grained level,
revision control
In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...
is often used for keeping track of incrementally-different versions of information, whether or not this information is computer software.
Modern computer software is often tracked using two different software versioning schemes: an
''internal version number'' that may be incremented many times in a single day, such as a revision control number, and a ''release version'' that typically changes far less often, such as
semantic versioning
Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique ''version names'' or unique ''version numbers'' to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category (e.g., major or minor), these numbers are generally assig ...
or a
project code name
A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may also be used in industrial c ...
.
History
File numbers were used especially in public administration, as well as companies, to uniquely identify files or cases. For computer files this practice was introduced for the first time with MIT's ITS file system, later the TENEX filesystem for the PDP-10 in 1972.
Later lists of files including their versions were added, and dependencies amongst them. Linux distributions like Debian, with its
dpkg
dpkg is the software at the base of the package management system in the free operating system Debian and its numerous derivatives. dpkg is used to install, remove, and provide information about .deb packages.
dpkg (Debian Package) itself is a ...
, early on created package management software which could resolve dependencies between its packages. Debians first try was that a package knew other packages which depend on it. From 1994 on this idea was reverted, so a package knew the packages it needed. When installing a package, dependency resolution was used to automatically calculate the packages needed as well, and install them with the desired package. To facilitate upgrades, minimum package versions were introduced. Thus the numbering scheme needed to tell which version was newer than the required one.
Schemes
A variety of version numbering schemes have been created to keep track of different versions of a piece of software. The ubiquity of computers has also led to these schemes being used in contexts outside computing.
Sequence-based identifiers
![VersionNumbers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/VersionNumbers.svg)
In sequence-based software versioning schemes, each
software release
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...
is assigned a unique identifier that consists of one or more sequences of numbers or letters. This is the extent of the commonality; schemes vary widely in areas such as the number of sequences, the attribution of meaning to individual sequences, and the means of incrementing the sequences.
Change significance
In some schemes, sequence-based identifiers are used to convey the significance of changes between releases. Changes are classified by significance level, and the decision of which sequence to change between releases is based on the significance of the changes from the previous release, whereby the first sequence is changed for the most significant changes, and changes to sequences after the first represent changes of decreasing significance.
Depending on the scheme, significance may be assessed by lines of code changed, function points added or removed, the potential impact on customers in terms of work required to adopt a new version, risk of bugs or undeclared breaking changes, degree of changes in visual layout, the number of new features, or almost anything the product developers or marketers deem to be significant, including marketing desire to stress the "relative goodness" of the new version.
Semantic versioning
![Semver](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Semver.jpg)
(aka SemVer)
[
Preston-Werner, Tom (2013)]
Semantic Versioning
2.0.0. Creative Commons.
Retrieved from https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.html.
is a widely-adopted version scheme that uses a three-part version number (Major.Minor.Patch), an optional pre-release tag, and an optional build meta tag. In this scheme, risk and functionality are the measures of significance. Breaking changes are indicated by increasing the major number (high risk); new, non-breaking features increment the minor number (medium risk); and all other non-breaking changes increment the patch number (lowest risk). The presence of a pre-release tag (-alpha, -beta) indicates substantial risk, as does a major number of zero (0.y.z), which is used to indicate a work-in-progress that may contain any level of potentially breaking changes (highest risk). As an example of inferring compatibility from a SemVer version, software which relies on version 2.1.5 of an API is compatible with version 2.2.3, but not necessarily with 3.2.4.
Developers may choose to jump multiple minor versions at a time to indicate that significant features have been added, but are not enough to warrant incrementing a major version number; for example,
Internet Explorer 5
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) is a graphical web browser, the fifth version of Internet Explorer, the successor to Internet Explorer 4 and one of the main participants of the first Browser wars, browser war. Its distribution methods and Wi ...
from 5.1 to 5.5 or
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...
5 to 5.5. This may be done to emphasize the value of the upgrade to the software user or, as in Adobe's case, to represent a release halfway between major versions (although levels of sequence-based versioning are not necessarily limited to a single digit, as in
Blender
A blender (sometimes called a mixer or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen appliance, kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsion, emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender ...
version 2.91 or ''
Minecraft
''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...
'' Java Edition starting from 1.10).
A different approach is to use the ''major'' and ''minor'' numbers along with an alphanumeric string denoting the release type, e.g. "alpha" (a), "beta" (b), or "release candidate" (rc). A
software release train
Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique ''version names'' or unique ''version numbers'' to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category (e.g., major or minor), these numbers are generally assig ...
using this approach might look like 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 → 1.0b1, 1.0b2 (with some fixes), 1.0b3 (with more fixes) → 1.0rc1 (which, if it is stable ''enough''), 1.0rc2 (if more bugs are found) → 1.0. It is a common practice in this scheme to lock out new features and breaking changes during the release candidate phases and, for some teams, even betas are locked down to bug fixes only, to ensure convergence on the target release.
Other schemes impart meaning on individual sequences:
:''
major.minor build[.revision''__(example:_''1.2.12.102'')
:''
major.minor[.maintenance[.build.html" ;"title="revision.html" ;"title="build[.revision">build[.revision'' (example: ''1.2.12.102'')
:''
major.minor[.maintenance[.build">revision.html" ;"title="build[.revision">build[.revision'' (example: ''1.2.12.102'')
:''
major.minor[.maintenance[.build'' (example: ''1.4.3.5249'')
Again, in these examples, the definition of what constitutes a "major" as opposed to a "minor" change is entirely subjective and up to the author, as is what defines a "build", or how a "revision" differs from a "minor" change.
Shared libraries in Solaris and Linux may use the ''
current.revision.age'' format where:
:''current'': The most recent interface number that the library implements.
:''revision'': The implementation number of the current interface.
:''age'': The difference between the newest and oldest interfaces that the library implements. This use of the third field is specific to
libtool
In computer programming, GNU Libtool is a software development tool, part of the GNU build system, consisting of a shell script created to address the software portability problem when compiling shared libraries from source code.
It hides t ...
: others may use a different meaning or simply ignore it.
A similar problem of relative change significance and versioning nomenclature exists in book publishing, where
edition numbers or names can be chosen based on varying criteria.
In most proprietary software, the first released version of a software product has version 1.
Degree of compatibility
Some projects use the major version number to indicate incompatible releases. Two examples are
Apache Portable Runtime
The Apache Portable Runtime (APR) is a supporting library for the Apache web server. It provides a set of APIs that map to the underlying operating system (OS). Where the OS does not support a particular function, APR will provide an emulation. ...
(APR)
and the FarCry CMS.
Often programmers write new software to be
backward compatible
Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especially i ...
, i.e., the new software is designed to interact correctly with older versions of the software (using old protocols and file formats) and the most recent version (using the latest protocols and file formats). For example, IBM
z/OS
z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions.Starting with the earliest:
* O ...
is designed to work properly with 3 consecutive major versions of the operating system running in the same sysplex.
This enables people who run a
high availability
High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period.
Modernization has resulted in an increased reliance on these systems. Fo ...
computer cluster to keep most of the computers up and running while one machine at a time is shut down, upgraded, and restored to service.
Often
packet header
In information technology, header refers to supplemental data placed at the beginning of a block of data being stored or transmitted. In data transmission, the data following the header is sometimes called the ''payload'' or ''body''.
It is vital ...
s and
file format
A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free.
Some file formats ...
include a version number – sometimes the same as the version number of the software that wrote it; other times a "protocol version number" independent of the software version number.
The code to handle old
deprecated
In several fields, especially computing, deprecation is the discouragement of use of some terminology, feature, design, or practice, typically because it has been superseded or is no longer considered efficient or safe, without completely removing ...
protocols and file formats is often seen as
cruft
Cruft is a jargon word for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for defective, superseded, useless, superfluous, or dysfunctional elements in computer software.
History
Around 1958, the term was ...
.
Designating development stage
Software in the experimental stage (
alpha
Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...
or
beta
Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...
) often uses a zero in the first ("major") position of the sequence to designate its status. However, this scheme is only useful for the early stages, not for upcoming releases with established software where the version number has already progressed past 0.
A number of schemes are used to denote the status of a newer release:
* ''Alphanumeric suffix'' is a common scheme adopted by semantic versioning.
In this scheme, versions have affixed a dash plus some alphanumeric characters to indicate the status.
* ''Numeric status'' is a scheme that uses numbers to indicate the status as if it's part of the sequence. A typical choice is the third position for the four-position versioning.
* ''Numeric 90+'' is another scheme that uses numbers, but apparently under a number of a previous version. A large number in the last position, typically 90 or higher, is used. This is commonly used by older open-source projects like
Fontconfig
Fontconfig (or fontconfig) is a free software program library designed to provide configuration, enumeration and substitution of fonts to other programs. Fontconfig was originally written and maintained by Keith Packard, and is currently maintain ...
.
The two purely numeric forms removes the special logic required to handle the comparison of "alpha < beta < rc < no prefix" as found in semantic versioning, at the cost of clarity. (Semantic versioning actually does not specify specific terms for development stages; the comparison is simply in
lexicographical order
In mathematics, the lexicographic or lexicographical order (also known as lexical order, or dictionary order) is a generalization of the alphabetical order of the dictionaries to sequences of ordered symbols or, more generally, of elements of a ...
.)
Incrementing sequences
There are two schools of thought regarding how numeric version numbers are incremented. Most
free and open-source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
packages, including
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...
, treat versions as a series of individual numbers, separated by periods, with a progression such as 1.7.0, 1.8.0, 1.8.1, 1.9.0, 1.10.0, 1.11.0, 1.11.1, 1.11.2, and so on.
On the other hand, some software packages identify releases by decimal numbers: 1.7, 1.8, 1.81, 1.82, 1.9, etc. Decimal versions were common in the 1980s, for example with
NetWare
NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol.
The original NetWare product in 19 ...
,
DOS
DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems.
DOS may also refer to:
Computing
* Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel
* Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
, and
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
, but even in the 2000s have been for example used by
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...
and
Movable Type
Movable type (US English; moveable type in British English) is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual alphanumeric characters or punctuatio ...
. In the decimal scheme, 1.81 is the minor version following 1.8, while maintenance releases (i.e. bug fixes only) may be denoted with an alphabetic suffix, such as 1.81a or 1.81b.
The standard
GNU
GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...
version numbering scheme is major.minor.revision, but
Emacs
Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...
is a notable example using another scheme where the major number (1) was dropped and a ''user site'' revision was added which is always zero in original Emacs packages but increased by distributors.
Similarly,
Debian
Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...
package numbers are prefixed with an optional "epoch", which is used to allow the versioning scheme to be changed.
Resetting
In some cases, developers may decide to reset the major version number. This is sometimes used to denote a new development phase being released. For example, ''
Minecraft
''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...
'' Alpha ran from version 1.0.0 to 1.2.6, and when Beta was released, it reset the major version number and ran from 1.0 to 1.8. Once the game was fully released, the major version number again reset to 1.0.0.
Separating sequences
When printed, the sequences may be separated with characters. The choice of characters and their usage varies by the scheme. The following list shows hypothetical examples of separation schemes for the same release (the thirteenth third-level revision to the fourth second-level revision to the second first-level revision):
* A scheme may use the same character between all sequences: 2.4.13, 2/4/13, 2-4-13
* A scheme choice of which sequences to separate may be inconsistent, separating some sequences but not others: 2.413
* A scheme's choice of characters may be inconsistent within the same identifier: 2.4_13
When a period is used to separate sequences, it ''may'' or ''may not'' represent a decimal point—see "
Incrementing sequences" section for various interpretation styles.
Number of sequences
There is sometimes a fourth, unpublished number which denotes the
software build
In software development, a build is the process of converting source code files into standalone software artifact(s) that can be run on a computer, or the result of doing so.
Functions
Building software is an end-to-end process that involves ma ...
(as used by
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
).
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...
is a notable case where a four-part version number is indicated publicly, as in 10.1.53.64. Some companies also include the build date. Version numbers may also include letters and other characters, such as
Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles i ...
Release 1a.
Negative numbers
Some projects use negative version numbers. One example is the
SmartEiffel
SmartEiffel is a free Eiffel compiler. The compiler translates Eiffel code either to C or Java bytecode. Hence it can be used to write programs that run on virtually any platform for which an ANSI C compiler or a Java virtual machine exist.
Sma ...
compiler which started from −1.0 and counted upwards to 0.0.
Date of release
![Street Fighter EX Opening Version Number](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Street_Fighter_EX_Opening_Version_Number.png)
Many projects use a date-based versioning scheme called Calendar Versioning (aka CalVer).
Ubuntu
Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...
is one example of a project using calendar versioning; Ubuntu 18.04, for example, was released in April 2018. This has the advantage of being easily relatable to development schedules and support timelines. Some video games also use date as versioning, for example the
arcade game
An arcade game or coin-op game is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are presented as primarily games of skill and include arcade v ...
''
Street Fighter EX
is a 2D head-to-head fighting game with 3D graphics, originally released as a coin-operated arcade game for the Sony ZN hardware in 1996. It is a spin-off of the ''Street Fighter'' series co-produced by Capcom with Arika and was the first ...
''. At startup it displays the version number as a date plus a region code, for example ''961219 ASIA''.
When using dates in versioning, for instance, file names, it is common to use the
ISO 8601
ISO 8601 is an international standard covering the worldwide exchange and communication of date and time-related data. It is maintained by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and was first published in 1988, wi ...
scheme
''YYYY-MM-DD'', as this is easily string-sorted in increasing or decreasing order. The hyphens are sometimes omitted. The
Wine
Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are m ...
project formerly used a date versioning scheme, which used the year followed by the month followed by the day of the release; for example, "Wine 20040505". ''
Minecraft
''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...
'' had a similar version formatting, but instead used DDHHMM, ex: rd-132211, 13 being the 13th of May, and 2211 being 22:11.
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
build numbers are an encoded date:
the first two digits indicate the number of months that have passed from the January of the year in which the project started (with each major Office release being a different project), while the last two digits indicate the day of that month. So 3419 is the 19th day of the 34th month after the month of January of the year the project started.
Other examples that identify versions by year include
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...
88 and
WordPerfect Office 2003. When a year is used to denote version, it is generally for marketing purposes, and an actual version number also exists. For example,
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...
is internally versioned as
MS-DOS 7.00 and Windows 4.00; likewise,
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), releas ...
is internally versioned as NT 5.0.
Python
The
Python Software Foundation
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is an American nonprofit organization devoted to the Python programming language, launched on March 6, 2001. The mission of the foundation is to foster development of the Python community and is responsible for ...
has published PEP 440 – Version Identification and Dependency Specification,
outlining their own flexible scheme, that defines an epoch segment, a release segment, pre-release and post-release segments and a development release segment.
TeX
TeX
Tex may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr.
Entertainment
* ''Tex'', the Italian ...
has an
idiosyncratic
An idiosyncrasy is an unusual feature of a person (though there are also other uses, see below). It can also mean an odd habit. The term is often used to express eccentricity or peculiarity. A synonym may be "quirk".
Etymology
The term "idiosyncra ...
version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end, so that the version number
asymptotically
In analytic geometry, an asymptote () of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the ''x'' or ''y'' coordinates tends to infinity. In projective geometry and related contexts, ...
approaches
; a form of
unary numbering – the version number is the number of digits. The current version is 3.141592653. This is a reflection of TeX being very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. TeX developer
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...
has stated that the ''"absolutely final change (to be made after
isdeath)"'' will be to change the version number to , at which point all remaining bugs will become permanent features.
In a similar way, the version number of
Metafont asymptotically approaches
.
Apple
During the era of the
classic Mac OS
Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...
, minor version numbers rarely went beyond ".1". When they did, they usually jumped straight to ".5", suggesting the release was "more significant". Thus, "8.5" was marketed as its own release, representing "Mac OS 8 and a half", and 8.6 effectively meant "8.5.1".
Mac OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...
departed from this trend, in large part because "X" (the Roman numeral for 10) was in the name of the product. As a result, all versions of OS X began with the number 10. The first major release of OS X was given the version number 10.0, but the next major release was not 11.0. Instead, it was numbered 10.1, followed by 10.2, 10.3, and so on for each subsequent major release. Thus the 11th major version of OS X was labeled "10.10". Even though the "X" was dropped from the name as of
macOS 10.12
macOS Sierra (version 10.12) is the thirteenth major release of macOS (formerly known as and ), Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. The name "macOS" stems from the intention to uniform the operating syst ...
, this numbering scheme continued through macOS 10.15. Under the "X"-based versioning scheme, the third number (instead of the second) denoted a minor release, and additional updates below this level, as well as updates to a given major version of OS X coming after the release of a new major version, were titled Supplemental Updates.
The Roman numeral X was concurrently leveraged for marketing purposes across multiple product lines. Both
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...
and
Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is a series of non-linear editing, non-linear video editing software programs first developed by Macromedia, Macromedia Inc. and later Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro 10.6.4, runs on Macintosh, Mac computers power ...
jumped from version 7 directly to version 10, QuickTime X and Final Cut Pro X. Like Mac OS X itself, the products were not upgrades to previous versions, but brand-new programs. As with OS X, major releases for these programs incremented the second digit and minor releases were denoted using a third digit. The "X" was dropped from Final Cut's name with the release of macOS 11.0 (see below), and QuickTime's branding became moot when the framework was deprecated in favor of AVFoundation in 2011 (the program for playing QuickTime video was only named QuickTime Player from the start).
Apple's next macOS release, provisionally numbered 10.16,
was officially announced as
macOS 11
macOS Big Sur (version 11) is the seventeenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s operating system for Macintosh computers. It was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 22, 2020, and was released to the public ...
at WWDC in June 2020, and released in November 2020. The following macOS version,
macOS Monterey
macOS Monterey (version 12) is the eighteenth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop operating system for Macintosh computers. The successor to macOS Big Sur, it was announced at WWDC 2021 on June 7, 2021, and released on October 25, 2021. m ...
, was released in October 2021 and bumped its major version number to 12.
Microsoft Windows
The
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
operating system was first labelled with standard version numbers for
Windows 1.0
Windows 1.0 is the first major release of Microsoft Windows, a family of graphical operating systems for personal computers developed by Microsoft. It was first released to manufacturing in the United States on November 20, 1985, while the Euro ...
through
Windows 3.11
Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0.
Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3 ...
. After this Microsoft excluded the version number from the product name. For
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...
(version 4.0),
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...
(4.10) and
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), releas ...
(5.0), year of the release was included in the product title. After Windows 2000, Microsoft created the
Windows Server
Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a group of operating systems (OS) for servers that Microsoft has been developing since July 27, 1993. The first OS that was released for this platform was Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server. With the r ...
family which continued the year-based style with a difference: For minor releases, Microsoft suffixed "R2" to the title, e.g.,
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2 is the fifth version of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft and released as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became General av ...
(version 6.1). This style had remained consistent to this date. The client versions of Windows however did not adopt a consistent style. First, they received names with arbitrary alphanumeric suffixes as with
Windows ME
Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (marketed with the pronunciation of the pronoun "me"), is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Windo ...
(4.90),
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...
(5.1), and
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
(6.0). Then, once again Microsoft adopted incremental numbers in the title, but this time, they were not versioning numbers; the version numbers of
Windows 7
Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
,
Windows 8
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
and
Windows 8.1
Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...
are respectively 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3. In
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
, the version number leaped to 10.0 and
subsequent updates to the OS only incremented build number and update build revision (UBR) number.
The successor of Windows 10,
Windows 11
Windows 11 is the latest major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released in October 2021. It is a free upgrade to its predecessor, Windows 10 (2015), and is available for any Windows 10 devices that meet the new Windows 11 ...
, was released on October 5, 2021. Despite being named "11", the new Windows release didn't bump its major version number to 11. Instead, it stayed at the same version number of 10.0, used by Windows 10.
Other schemes
Some software producers use different schemes to denote releases of their software. The Debian project uses a major/minor versioning scheme for releases of its operating system but uses code names from the movie ''
Toy Story
''Toy Story'' is a 1995 American computer-animated comedy film directed by John Lasseter (in his feature directorial debut), produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The first installment in the '' Toy Story ...
'' during development to refer to stable, unstable, and testing releases.
BLAG Linux and GNU
BLAG Linux and GNU is a discontinued Linux distribution made by the Brixton Linux Action Group.
BLAG is a discontinued, single-CD distro with applications desktop users "expect" from a desktop including multimedia, graphics, desktop internet app ...
features very large version numbers: major releases have numbers such as 50000 and 60000, while minor releases increase the number by 1 (e.g. 50001, 50002). Alpha and beta releases are given decimal version numbers slightly less than the major release number, such as 19999.00071 for alpha 1 of version 20000, and 29999.50000 for beta 2 of version 30000. Starting at 9001 in 2003, the most recent version is 140000.
Urbit
Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform. The platform seeks to deconstruct the client-server model in favour of a federated network of personal servers in a peer-to-peer network with a consistent digital identity.
Overview
The Urb ...
uses ''Kelvin versioning'' (named after the absolute
Kelvin
The kelvin, symbol K, is the primary unit of temperature in the International System of Units (SI), used alongside its prefixed forms and the degree Celsius. It is named after the Belfast-born and University of Glasgow-based engineer and phys ...
temperature scale): software versions start at a high number and count down to version 0, at which point the software is considered finished and no further modifications are made.
Internal version numbers
Software may have an "internal" version number which differs from the version number shown in the product name (and which typically follows version numbering rules more consistently).
Java SE
Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for desktop and server environments. Java SE was formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE).
The platform uses Ja ...
5.0, for example, has the internal version number of 1.5.0, and versions of Windows from NT 4 on have continued the standard numerical versions internally: Windows 2000 is
NT 5.0, XP is Windows NT 5.1,
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, 2 ...
and
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, released on April 25, 2005, is an edition of Windows XP for x86-64 personal computers. It is designed to use the expanded 64-bit memory address space provided by the x86-64 architecture.
The prima ...
are NT 5.2,
Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2008 is the fourth release of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of the operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, and generally to retail on Fe ...
and Vista are NT 6.0,
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2 is the fifth version of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft and released as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became General av ...
and Windows 7 are NT 6.1,
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012, codenamed "Windows Server 8", is the sixth version of the Windows Server operating system by Microsoft, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It is the server version of Windows based on Windows 8 and succe ...
and
Windows 8
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
are NT 6.2, and
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2012 R2, codenamed "Windows Server 8.1" or "Windows Server Blue", is the seventh version of the Windows Server operating system by Microsoft, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was unveiled on June 3, 2013 a ...
and
Windows 8.1
Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...
are NT 6.3, however the first version of Windows 10 was 10.0 (10.0.10240). Note, however, that Windows NT is only on its fifth major revision, as its first release was numbered 3.1 (to match the then-current Windows release number) and the Windows 10 launching made a version leap from 6.3 to 10.0.
Pre-release versions
In conjunction with the various versioning schemes listed above, a system for denoting pre-release versions is generally used, as the program makes its way through the stages of the
software release life cycle
A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...
.
Programs that are in an early stage are often called "alpha" software, after the first letter in the Greek alphabet. After they mature but are not yet ready for release, they may be called "beta" software, after the second letter in the Greek alphabet. Generally alpha software is tested by developers only, while beta software is distributed for community testing.
Some systems use numerical versions less than 1 (such as 0.9), to suggest their approach toward a final "1.0" release. This is a common convention in
open source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...
.
However, if the pre-release version is for an existing software package (e.g. version 2.5), then an "a" or "alpha" may be appended to the version number. So the alpha version of the 2.5 release might be identified as 2.5a or 2.5.a.
An alternative is to refer to pre-release versions as "release candidates", so that software packages which are soon to be released as a particular version may carry that version tag followed by "rc-#", indicating the number of the release candidate; when the final version is released, the "rc" tag is removed.
Release train
A software release train is a form of software release schedule in which a number of distinct series of versioned software releases for multiple products are released as a number of different "trains" on a regular schedule. Generally, for each product line, a number of different release trains are running at a given time, with each train moving from initial release to eventual maturity and retirement on a planned schedule. Users may experiment with a newer release train before adopting it for production, allowing them to experiment with newer, "raw", releases early, while continuing to follow the previous train's
point release
A point release (also a dot release) is a minor release of a software project, especially one intended to fix bugs or do small cleanups rather than add significant features. Often, there are too many bugs to be fixed in a single major or minor re ...
s for their production systems prior to moving to the new release train as it becomes mature.
Cisco's
IOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
software platform used a release train schedule with many distinct trains for many years. More recently, a number of other platforms including
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
and Fenix for Android,
Eclipse
An eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ce ...
,
LibreOffice
LibreOffice () is a free and open-source productivity software, office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was fork (software development), forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of t ...
,
Ubuntu
Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...
, Fedora, Python, digiKam and
VMware
VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture.
VMware's desktop software ru ...
have adopted the release train model.
Modifications to the numeric system
Odd-numbered versions for development releases
Between the 1.0 and the 2.6.x series, the
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
used
odd
Odd means unpaired, occasional, strange or unusual, or a person who is viewed as eccentric.
Odd may also refer to:
Acronym
* ODD (Text Encoding Initiative) ("One Document Does it all"), an abstracted literate-programming format for describing X ...
minor version numbers to denote development releases and
even
Even may refer to:
General
* Even (given name), a Norwegian male personal name
* Even (surname)
* Even (people), an ethnic group from Siberia and Russian Far East
** Even language, a language spoken by the Evens
* Odd and Even, a solitaire game w ...
minor version numbers to denote stable releases; see . For example, Linux 2.3 was a development family of the second major design of the Linux kernel, and Linux 2.4 was the stable release family that Linux 2.3 matured into. After the minor version number in the Linux kernel is the release number, in ascending order; for example, Linux 2.4.0 → Linux 2.4.22. Since the 2004 release of the 2.6 kernel, Linux no longer uses this system, and has a much shorter release cycle.
The same odd-even system is used by some other software with long release cycles, such as
Node.js
Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...
up to version 0.12 as well as GNOME and
WineHQ
Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for ''Wine Is Not an Emulator'', now just "Wine") is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like ...
.
Dropping the most significant element
Sun's
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
has at times had a hybrid system, where the internal version number has always been 1.''x'' but has been marketed by reference only to the ''x'':
* JDK 1.0.3
* JDK 1.1.2 through 1.1.8
* J2SE 1.2.0 ("Java 2") through 1.4.2
* Java 1.5.0, 1.6.0, 1.7.0, 1.8.0 ("Java 5, 6, 7, 8")
Sun also dropped the first digit for Solaris, where Solaris 2.8 (or 2.9) is referred to as Solaris 8 (or 9) in marketing materials.
A similar jump took place with the
Asterisk
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...
open-source PBX construction kit in the early 2010s, whose project leads announced that the current version 1.8.x would soon be followed by version 10.
This approach, panned by many because it breaks the semantic significance of the sections of the version number, has been adopted by an increasing number of vendors including
Mozilla
Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...
(for
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
).
Version number ordering systems
Version numbers very quickly evolve from simple integers (1, 2, ...) to rational numbers (2.08, 2.09, 2.10)
and then to non-numeric "numbers" such as 4:3.4.3-2. These complex version numbers are therefore better treated as character strings. Operating systems that include package management facilities (such as all non-trivial Linux or
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
distributions) will use a distribution-specific algorithm for comparing version numbers of different software packages. For example, the ordering algorithms of
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat has become ass ...
and derived distributions differ to those of the Debian-like distributions.
As an example of surprising version number ordering implementation behavior, in Debian, leading zeroes are ignored in chunks, so that 5.0005 and 5.5 are considered as equal, and 5.5<5.0006. This can confuse users; string-matching tools may fail to find a given version number; and this can cause subtle bugs in
package management
A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner.
A package manager deals wi ...
if the programmers use string-indexed data structures such as version-number indexed
hash table
In computing, a hash table, also known as hash map, is a data structure that implements an associative array or dictionary. It is an abstract data type that maps keys to values. A hash table uses a hash function to compute an ''index'', als ...
s.
To ease sorting, some software packages represent each component of the ''major.minor.release'' scheme with a fixed width. Perl represents its version numbers as a floating-point number; for example, Perl's 5.8.7 release can also be represented as 5.008007. This allows a theoretical version of 5.8.10 to be represented as 5.008010. Other software packages pack each segment into a fixed bit width; for example, on Microsoft Windows, version number 6.3.9600.16384 would be represented as
hexadecimal
In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexa ...
0x0006000325804000. The floating-point scheme breaks down if any segment of the version number exceeds 999; a packed-binary scheme employing 16 bits apiece breaks down after 65535.
Political and cultural significance of version numbers
Version 1.0 as a milestone
The
free-software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
and
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
communities tend to release software
early and often. Initial versions are numbers less than 1, with these 0.x version used to convey that the software is incomplete and not reliable enough for general release or usable in its current state. Backward-incompatible changes are common with 0.x versions.
Version 1.0 is used as a major
milestone
A milestone is a numbered marker placed on a route such as a road, railway line, canal or boundary. They can indicate the distance to towns, cities, and other places or landmarks; or they can give their position on the route relative to so ...
, indicating that the software has at least all major features plus functions the developers wanted to get into that version, and is considered reliable enough for general release.
[ A good example of this is the Linux kernel, which was first released as version 0.01 in 1991,][Torvalds, Linus: ]
Notes for linux release 0.01
' kernel.org, 1991. and took until 1994 to reach version 1.0.0.
The developers of the arcade game
An arcade game or coin-op game is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are presented as primarily games of skill and include arcade v ...
emulator MAME
MAME (formerly an acronym of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator designed to recreate the hardware of arcade game systems in software on modern personal computers and other platforms. Its intention is to preserve ...
do not ever intend to release a version 1.0 of the program because there will always be more arcade game
An arcade game or coin-op game is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are presented as primarily games of skill and include arcade v ...
s to emulate and thus the project can never be truly completed. Accordingly, version 0.99 was followed by version 0.100.
Since the internet has become widespread, most commercial software vendors no longer follow the maxim that a major version should be "complete" and instead rely on patches with bugfixes to sort out the known issues which a solution has been found for and could be fixed.
Version numbers as marketing
A relatively common practice is to make major jumps in version numbers for marketing reasons. Sometimes software vendors just bypass the 1.0 release or quickly release a release with a subsequent version number because 1.0 software is considered by many customers too immature to trust with production deployments. For example, as in the case of dBase II
dBase (also stylized dBASE) was one of the first database management systems for microcomputers and the most successful in its day. The dBase system includes the core database engine, a query system, a forms engine, and a programming language ...
, a product is launched with a version number that implies that it is more mature than it is.
Other times version numbers are increased to match those of competitors. This can be seen in many examples of product version numbering by Microsoft, America Online
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...
, Sun Solaris
Solaris may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film
* ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem
** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg
** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...
, Java Virtual Machine
A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describes ...
, SCO Unix, WordPerfect. Microsoft Access
Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Access Database Engine (ACE) with a graphical user interface and software-development tools (not to be confused with the old Microsoft Access w ...
jumped from version 2.0 to version 7.0, to match the version number of Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...
.
Microsoft has also been the target of 'catch-up' versioning, with the Netscape
Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...
browsers skipping version 5 to 6, in line with Microsoft's Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
, but also because the Mozilla application suite inherited version 5 in its user agent
In computing, a user agent is any software, acting on behalf of a user, which "retrieves, renders and facilitates end-user interaction with Web content". A user agent is therefore a special kind of software agent.
Some prominent examples of us ...
string during pre-1.0 development and Netscape 6.x was built upon Mozilla's code base.
Another example of keeping up with competitors is when Slackware
Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions ...
Linux jumped from version 4 to version 7 in 1999.
Superstition
*The Office 2007 release of Microsoft Office had an internal version number of 12. The next version, Office 2010, has an internal version of 14, due to superstitions surrounding the number 13. Visual Studio 2013 is Version number 12.0 of the product, and the new version, Visual Studio 2015 has the Version number 14.0 for the same reasons.
*Roxio Toast
Roxio Toast is an optical disc authoring and media conversion software application for Mac OS X. Its name is a play on the word ''burn'', a term used for the writing of information onto a disc through the use of a laser.
Discs can be burned di ...
went from version 12 to version 14, likely in an effort to skip the superstitions surrounding the number 13.
*Corel
Cascade Parent Limited, doing business as Alludo (pronounced like "all you do"), is a Canadian software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, specializing in graphics processing. Formerly called the Corel Corporation ( ; from the abbreviation ...
's WordPerfect Office, version 13 is marketed as "X3" (Roman number
Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, eac ...
10 and "3"). The procedure has continued into the next version, X4. The same has happened with Corel's Graphic Suite (i.e. CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. It is also the name of the Corel graphics suite, which includes the bitmap-image editor Corel Photo-Paint as well as other graphics-related programs (see below). T ...
, Corel Photo-Paint
Corel Photo-Paint is a raster graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel since 1992. Corel markets the software for Windows and Mac OS operating systems, previously having marketed versions for Linux (Version 9, requiring Wine). Its primary m ...
) as well as its video editing software
Video editing software, or a video editor is software used performing the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a non-linear editing system. It has replaced traditional flatbed celluloid film editing tools and analog video ta ...
"Video Studio".
*Sybase
Sybase, Inc. was an enterprise software and services company. The company produced software to manage and analyze information in relational databases, with facilities located in California and Massachusetts. Sybase was acquired by SAP in 2010; ...
skipped major versions 13 ''and'' 14 in its Adaptive Server Enterprise relational database product, moving from 12.5 to 15.0.
* ABBYY Lingvo Dictionary uses numbering 12, x3 (14), x5 (15).
* SUSE Linux Enterprise skipped version 13 and 14 after version 12 and directly released SLES 15 in July 2018.
Geek culture
* The SUSE Linux distribution started at version 4.2, to reference 42, "the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" mentioned in Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author and screenwriter, best known for ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' developed into a " ...
' ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' (sometimes referred to as ''HG2G'', ''HHGTTG'', ''H2G2'', or ''tHGttG'') is a comic science fiction, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally The Hitchhiker's Guide to th ...
''.
* A Slackware Linux distribution was versioned 13.37, referencing leet
Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. ...
.
* Finnix
Finnix is a Debian-based Live CD operating system, developed by Ryan Finnie and intended for system administrators for tasks such as filesystem recovery, network monitoring and OS installation. Finnix is a relatively small distribution, with an ...
skipped from version 93.0 to 100, partly to fulfill the assertion, "There Will Be No Finnix '95", a reference to Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...
.
* The Tagged Image File Format
Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processin ...
specification has used 42 as internal version number since its inception, its designers not expecting to alter it anymore during their (or its) lifetime since it would conflict with its development directives.
Overcoming perceived marketing difficulties
In the mid-1990s, the rapidly growing CMMS
A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), also known as a computerized maintenance management information system (CMMIS), is any software package that maintains a computer database of information about an organization's maintenance o ...
, Maximo, moved from Maximo Series 3 directly to Series 5, skipping Series 4 due to that number's perceived marketing difficulties in the Chinese market, where the number 4 is associated with "death" (see tetraphobia
Tetraphobia () is the practice of avoiding instances of the digit . It is a superstition most common in East Asian nations.
__TOC__
Rationale
The Chinese word for "four" (, pinyin: sì, jyutping: sei3), sounds quite similar to the word for "de ...
). This did not, however, stop Maximo Series 5 version 4.0 being released. (The "Series" versioning has since been dropped, effectively resetting version numbers after Series 5 version 1.0's release.)
Significance
In software engineering
Version numbers are used in practical terms by the consumer, or client
Client(s) or The Client may refer to:
* Client (business)
* Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer
* Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...
, to identify or compare their copy of the software product against another copy, such as the newest version released by the developer. For the programmer or company, versioning is often used on a revision-by-revision basis, where individual parts of the software are compared and contrasted with newer or older revisions of those same parts, often in a collaborative version control system
In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...
.
In the 21st century, more programmers started to use a formalized version policy, such as the semantic versioning policy. The purpose of such policies is to make it easier for other programmers to know when code changes are likely to break things they have written. Such policies are especially important for software libraries
In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subro ...
and frameworks
A framework is a generic term commonly referring to an essential supporting structure which other things are built on top of.
Framework may refer to:
Computing
* Application framework, used to implement the structure of an application for an op ...
, but may also be very useful to follow for command-line applications (which may be called from other applications) and indeed any other applications (which may be scripted and/or extended by third parties).
Versioning is also a required practice to enable many schemes of patching and upgrading software, especially to automatically decide what and where to upgrade to.
In technical support
Version numbers allow people providing support to ascertain ''exactly'' which code a user is running, so that they can rule out bugs that have already been fixed as a cause of an issue, and the like. This is especially important when a program has a substantial user community, especially when that community is large enough that the people providing technical support are ''not'' the people who wrote the code. The semantic meaning of version.revision.change style numbering is also important to information technology staff, who often use it to determine how much attention and research they need to pay to a new release before deploying it in their facility. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the changes, the larger the chances that something might break (although examining the Changelog, if any, may reveal only superficial or irrelevant changes). This is one reason for some of the distaste expressed in the "drop the major release" approach taken by Asterisk et alia: now, staff must (or at least should) do a full regression test for every update.
Use outside of software
Some computer file systems
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These progra ...
, such as the OpenVMS Filesystem, also keep versions for files. Versioning amongst documents is relatively similar to the routine used with computers and software engineering, where with each small change in the structure, contents, or conditions, the version number is incremented by 1, or a smaller or larger value, again depending on the personal preference of the author and the size or importance of changes made.
Software-style version numbers can be found in other media.
In some cases, the use is a direct analogy (for example: Jackass 2.5
''Jackass Number Two'' is a 2006 American reality slapstick comedy film directed by Jeff Tremaine. It is the sequel to '' Jackass: The Movie'' (2002), both based upon the MTV series '' Jackass''. Like its predecessor and the original television ...
, a version of Jackass Number Two with additional special features; the second album by Garbage
Garbage, trash, rubbish, or refuse is waste material that is discarded by humans, usually due to a perceived lack of utility. The term generally does not encompass bodily waste products, purely liquid or gaseous wastes, or toxic waste produc ...
, titled '' Version 2.0''; or ''Dungeons & Dragons
''Dungeons & Dragons'' (commonly abbreviated as ''D&D'' or ''DnD'') is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by TSR (company)#Tactical Studies Rules ...
'' 3.5, where the rules were revised from the third edition, but not so much as to be considered the fourth).
More often it's used to play on an association with high technology, and doesn't literally indicate a 'version' (e.g., ''Tron 2.0
''Tron 2.0'' is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions. The Microsoft Windows version of the game was released by Buena Vista Interactive on August 26, 2003. The macOS, Mac OS X version was released by MacPlay on Apri ...
'', a video game followup to the film ''Tron
''Tron'' (stylized as ''TRON'') is a 1982 American science fiction action-adventure film written and directed by Steven Lisberger from a story by Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird. The film stars Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a computer programmer a ...
'', or the television series ''The IT Crowd
''The IT Crowd'' is a British sitcom originally broadcast by Channel 4, written and directed by Graham Linehan, produced by Ash Atalla and starring Chris O'Dowd, Richard Ayoade, Katherine Parkinson, and Matt Berry. Set in the offices of the fict ...
'', which refers to the second season as Version 2.0). A particularly notable usage is Web 2.0
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...
, referring to websites from the early 2000s that emphasized user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...
, usability
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a soft ...
and interoperability
Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...
.
See also
*Continuous Data Protection Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup or real-time backup, refers to backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user s ...
*Maintenance release
A maintenance release (also minor release or Maintenance Pack or MP) is a release of a product that does not add new features or content. For instance, in computer software, maintenance releases are typically intended to solve minor problems, typi ...
*Product life cycle management
Product life-cycle management (PLM) is the succession of strategies by business management as a product goes through its life-cycle. The conditions in which a product is sold (advertising, saturation) changes over time and must be managed as it ...
*Release management
Release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; it includes testing and deploying software releases.
Relationship with processes
Organizations that ...
*Release notes
Release notes are documents that are distributed with software products or hardware products, sometimes when the product is still in the development or test state (e.g., a beta release). For products that have already been in use by clients, the r ...
*Software engineering
Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development.
A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...
Notes
References
External links
3 Effective Techniques For Software Versioning
Software version numbering
Document Foundation release plan for LibreOffice, showing release trains
{{DEFAULTSORT:Software Versioning
Version control
Software release