I believe this bug has already been resolved in part. When looking at the tags for core [1] we already have a 1.23.0-rc.1 which is nice. At this point I am not sure about the alpha tagging for WMF tough.

[1] https://git.wikimedia.org/tags/mediawiki%2Fcore.git

Wondering whether to move this to "Wikimedia > Deployment Systems" first...

Greg?

This would be surprisingly disruptive in our deployment tooling.

Relative python awesomeness: there is a python module that support the semantic versioning spec.

Pypi: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/semantic_version/
Doc: http://pythonhosted.org/semantic_version/

That being said, I would prefer a RFC to be filled about usage of Semantic Versioning and have it advertised on wikitech-l / mediawiki-l lists. Not to bikeshed, but to make sure the community is aware of the changes and have an opportunity to cast its voice.

I remember that dropping the "1." prefix from the version number was discussed some years ago on wikitech, and that at least that that point people where generally against it.

For Wikidata, we have switched all our components over to follow semver.

(In reply to Antoine "hashar" Musso from comment #4)

That being said, I would prefer a RFC to be filled about usage of Semantic
Versioning and have it advertised on wikitech-l / mediawiki-l lists. Not to
bikeshed, but to make sure the community is aware of the changes and have an
opportunity to cast its voice.

As far as I can tell, this would only affect RC releases. That seems like it is ripe for bikeshedding.

(In reply to Mark A. Hershberger from comment #6)

As far as I can tell, this would only affect RC releases. That seems like
it is ripe for bikeshedding.

Note that I was only talking about tarball releases, not WMF's versioning.

In T67289#681705, @MarkAHershberger wrote:

Note that I was only talking about tarball releases, not WMF's versioning.

They're tightly coupled, however, so one changes with the other.

Is the goal of this ticket to adopt the semver practice, or just the format?

Legoktm writes:

Is the goal of this ticket to adopt the semver practice, or just the format?

AFAICR, just the format. The practice wouldn't hurt, but the format is
what matters for software (like WikiApiary) that uses the format.

As we are rethinking and retooling our deployment process, I think we should standardize around semantic versioning for release branches & deployment tags. At least the format, and to the extent possible we should also practice good versioning.

The chosen suffixed lead to the wrong version comparison. 1.26.0-wmf.7 would be a newer version than 1.26.0-rc1. But in reality it would be the other way around. A way to make that fit would be either start rc with 1.26.1-rc1 or choose suffixes starting with letters that sort in the expected way.