DB Shepherd uses a versioning system called Gamever. It accepts naming conventions from Semver, but without the rules for version compatibility.
Gamever is not appropriate for software libraries or infrastructure projects. Basically, anything that you build upon. For all of that stuff, please use Semver. For everything else, Gamever is just more fun!
With Gamever, instead of just bumping up the version at regular intervals, or picking new versions on a calendar schedule, you decide whether work is equivalent to a major, minor, or patch release and bump the version up to the appropriate number.
It helps with making your roadmap a bit more transparent, as you have to plan and publish version bounties. It also shines a light on your contributors, which is always good with open source.
Yes! While you reset lower versions like in any other versioning scheme (e.g. from 2.7.1 to 3.0.0), with Gamever you add up the points with each release.
For a concrete example, if you were at version 1.1.1, and your next release contains two patch-level changes, then the next version released would be 1.1.3. If, after that the next release contained one major release feature and one patch release feature, the new version would be 2.0.1.
We recommend releasing early and often, but ultimately this is up to you and your project. The more work that gets done between releases, the larger the version jumps will be between releases.
We encourage you to break up major version work into a series of minor and/or patch features as well. This way, anyone who completes one of the minor or patch features gets credit for that work, and everyone shares credit for the major milestone.
Yeah, pretty much.