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What determines what version number a program or release should be?
For an example: Version 2012.1.0.125
Or: 1.0.269
and so on.
What determines what the Version Number is?
First, this varies from project to project. These are just my observations:
Some projects use dates: e.g., 2011.11.12.1 for the first release on November 12th, 2011. Most projects will have some boneheaded mistake that necessitates a near-immediate re-release of a new, fixed version, so the
.1at the end will eventually be called into being, if it wasn’t there from the start.Some projects use major.minor.subminor version numbers; typically, the subminor number will incremented for bugfixes. When enough bugfixes have been collected, or a new feature that’s really neat has been introduced, then the minor number is usually incremented. Bumping the major number is often reserved for releases that break API compatibility. (Sometimes releases that break ABI compatibility are done with minor version updates, but hopefully those are rare and not common.)
Some projects use a CVS or SVN checkin identity, or some “build number” to represent builds, as part of the version numbers. These typically include larger numbers such as your
125or269. These numbers are chosen because they are nicely monotonic, but don’t carry much meaning themselves.