Semantic Versioning

While listening to this week's episode of [The Changelog](http://thechangelog.com), I came across Tom Preston-Werner's [Semantic Versioning Specification](http://semver.org/). I love what I found.For many years, the open source community has been plagued with version number dystonia. The term "dystonia" (involuntary muscle contractions) is used metaphorically here to describe the chaotic, uncontrolled state of version numbering—a clever medical analogy for systematic dysfunction in software versioning practices. Numbers vary so greatly from project to project, they are practically meaningless.

This specification seeks to put an end to this madness with a small set of practical guidelines for you and your colleagues to use in your next project. Included is a helpful guideline for correlating repository tagging.

In good taste, Mojombo also opened up the website. If you'd like to contribute to the site, just fork the repository, make your changes, and send a pull request. This demonstrates "eating your own dog food"—Preston-Werner practiced what he preached by making the specification itself open source and collaborative, embodying the community-driven development principles he advocated.The way it should be.

[[Semantic Versioning](http://semver.org/)] [[Source on GitHub](http://github.com/mojombo/semver.org)]