version numbers

Cross-posting from http://drupal.org/node/77562 ...

We've seen explosive growth in 2005 and 2006 based the ability for Drupal sites to rapidly deploy new features that meet real world customer needs, not just fulfill technical requirements. This project aims to increase consultant and site administrators ability to effectively manage releases, security, versioning, issue tracking, and feature deployment into customer ready production environments. By directly improving the Drupal.org release and project management infrastructure we will speed up the life cycle for meeting customer and user requirements and ultimately improve the ability to manage Drupal web sites. Donating to this effort (via the PayPal link on the full proposal) provides funding to accelerate volunteer contributions the Drupal.org project maintainers have made over the past 8 months.

Overview

• Contributions will have real releases and version strings, just like Drupal core itself
• Security announcements will refer to exact versions of modules that are effected
• Issues will be tracked by the exact version number of the contribution where the bug is present
• Development branches for any given version of the Drupal core -- maintainers can add new features to their module or theme without endangering the stability of other code that is compatible with the same version of Drupal core.
• All contributions will be clearly identified with the version of Drupal core they are compatible with

For the rest of the proposal, please see the full post on drupal.org.