On 15 Jun 2016 2:59 pm, "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johns...@gmail.com> wrote: > > IIRC the plan is to have the machine version behave as if the middle number is present and always zero. It would be (the?) one place that the historical behavior remains visible but it is impossible to have a totally clean break.
I haven't been keeping up with hackers, sorry if this has been suggested already but... Why don't we just *actually* keep the middle digit and *actually* have it always be zero? So we would release 10.0.0 and 10.0.1 and the next major release would be 11.0.0. This would have two benefits: 1) It emphasises that minor releases continue to be safe minor updates that offer the same stability guarantees. Users would be less likely to be intimidated by 10.0.1 than they would be 10.1. And it gives users a consistent story they can apply to any version whether 9.x or 10.0+ 2) If we ever do release incompatible feature releases on older branches -- or more likely some fork does -- it gives them a natural way to number their release.