As Petr pointed out we're starting to run out of version numbers .... 99 increments for the whole life of a stable branch isn't enough.

We had a chat about this last night on Moodle HQ chat with various proposals:

Extend to 14 characters 200802140000

• my favourite idea but it turns out that it exceeds PHP_MAX_INT for 32-bit machines so can't work

Add current date as decimal to the branch date 2007101500.2008021400

• PHP floats don't support that sort of accuracy properly.

Add smaller floating point increments for branches only 2007101500.001

• we think this will work as long as we avoid testing any equalities.

So the current plan is:

1. Keep the same version numbering as now for HEAD (gives us 99 per day which is fine) 2007101599
2. Increment stable branches with .001 .002 .003 .004 as required (gives us 1000 changes per stable branch) 2007101500.999
3. Automatically update $release in all branches with the current date, starting from 1.9, to help bug reports etc eg 1.9 + (20080220)