there is nothing requiring or restricting the current version behavior other than "it's always been this way".
True. but that doesn't mean it's better. No way to know what release or test scripts might be relying on the current convention. Changing for the sake of change doesn't seem good. there's no reason we couldn't use more modern convention here like -rc#. I don't much like it, since "rc" always makes me think first of rc files. It also wouldn't fix the problem in jami (still not numeric). Another alternative: when this came up 30-odd years ago, rms changed the GNU maintainers doc to suggest x.y.90, .91, etc. for pretests. Doing that would at least have the benefit of following a recommendation, and as a side effect, would also fix jami's assumption (poor practice though it is, IMHO). https://gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Test-Releases.html#Test-Releases Doing an ls -R on alpha (fp:/srv/data/ftp-mirror/alpha/gnu), it seems (rough guess with some grep counting) the .90 convention is by far the most common approach (a couple thousand), followed by the suffix letter a la automake (~750 releases), followed by -rc (~360). -hexid and -date are both trailing the field. Other random conventions also present. It all feels like bikeshedding to me, so my inclination is to do nothing. If we do change, I think we should use .90. --best, karl.