Re: Emacs Versions: major, minor and ...?

[Colin Baxter]

>>>>> Stefan Monnier via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor 
>>>>> <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

    > mrf [2021-06-28 06:56:20] wrote:
    >> Colin Baxter writes:
    >>> The current emacs development version is "28.0.5". I know that
    >>> "28" is the value of the emacs-major-version variable and "0" is
    >>> the value of the emacs-minor-version variable. I assume "5" is
    >>> also the value of a variable, but what's its name?
    >> The third number after the dots is called micro or in some
    >> projects patch, please take a look at semantic versioning
    >> (semver.org) and the

    > Note that Emacs does not use semantic versioning.  Emacs release
    > versions have the shape NN.MM and nothing more.

    > Emacs code that's not released has versions of the form NN.MM.OO
    > where OO can be 50 to mean "this is the code we're working on that
    > will hopefully become NN.MM+1", or it can be a of the form 9x (or
    > 99x or 999x ..., tho I seem to remember we've also used a sequence
    > like 98, 99, 100, 101 at some point) for pretest versions
    > (basically beta-releases) of NN.MM+1.

    > [ In the past, Emacs *executables* had versions numbers of the
    > form NN.MM.BB (or NN.MM.OO.BB for non-release versions) where BB
    > was a "build number", i.e. something that gets incremented every
    > time the user builds Emacs again from the same directory.  We're
    > not using that any more, tho.  ]

Thank you for the information. In centuries to come, no doubt someone will
write a thesis unravelling the arcane numbering in emacs versions.

Best wishes,

Colin Baxter.