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

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

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.  ]


        Stefan