Do old‑style version numbers still make sense?

written by Mickey on 2025-06-20

Long before the endless scroll of release notes and automatic updates, software came packaged in physical media: floppies, CDs, DVDs. Version numbers were lovingly crafted—Version 3.5.2 meant something. It signaled a meaningful hierarchy: major features, minor improvements, bug fixes. You’d carefully note it in a spreadsheet, or stamp it on the media sleeve, and you knew exactly what you had.

Back then, if you were shipping a desktop app on CD, you couldn’t just push a micro‑patch. You needed a build, a test cycle, a labeled release. A three‑part version number made sense: major.minor.patch told a coherent story.

Then came broadband, app stores, Docker containers, continuous deployment pipelines—and everything changed. Today, software updates roll out automatically, sometimes multiple times per day. Does 3.5.2 still mean much in a sea of nightly builds and daily hot‑fixes?

Let's compare the old and new world:

Hand‑crafted version numbers (e.g. 2.4.7)

Pros:

• Convey structured meaning: major changes vs bug fixes.
• Easy to reference in support, documentation, or bug reports.
• Feels final, stable, versioned. Good for releases on solid media.

Cons:

• Arbitrariness in deciding what merits a version bump.
• Bottleneck: a human must decide to increment.
• Misleading in fast‑update contexts: “Oh, version 2.4.8? Is it worth updating today?”

Date‑based version numbers (e.g. 2025.06.20)

Pros:

• Clear timestamp: exactly when it was released.
• Scales effortlessly: daily, hourly, on‑the‑fly.
• Avoids ambiguity over “minor” vs “patch”—every build is traceable.

Cons:

• No structural hierarchy: can’t tell at a glance if it’s a major feature or a tiny fix.
• Slightly more verbose.
• Feels less “semantic” — you can’t infer scope from the version itself.

A possible compromise

What if we combine both? Let me propose a concatenation of major version and date, e.g. 5 – 2025.06.20.

Pros:

• MajorVersion indicates broad, breaking, feature‑set changes.
• Date signals exactly when you shipped it.
• Updates during the same day can have additional prefixes, if necessary.
• A major bump (say, 6 – ...) only happens on real, feature‑heavy releases.

Cons:

• Slightly more verbose.

Why this hybrid works? Because clarity meets structure. You immediately know: “Yep, still version 5, same major features as earlier builds, but built on June 20, 2025.” It’s also flexible: Keep shipping bug fixes or minor features even daily—no need to agonize over whether it’s 5.0.1 or 5.1.0. Last but not least, it because old‑school meets modern. You have the stability sense from “version 5” and the transparency of “built on 2025‑06‑20.”

Conclusion

We’ve evolved from floppy‑based releases where version numbers were carefully picked, to a sprawling world of ubiquitous, atomic updates. In that old era, structured numbering made sense; today, time‑stamps are king. But we don’t have to choose—by adopting a major‑version + build‑date scheme, we bridge both worlds.

Whether you distribute on physical media or via container orchestrators, you get:

• Semantic hierarchy, from major version.
• Precise timing, from date-based builds.
• Simplicity, avoiding patch/minor version anxiety.

In a world where software never really ends, maybe it’s time we let version numbers reflect what changed and when – without overthinking the how many dots. Stay curious, version wisely, and happy shipping.