Versioning and Stability

[balai]

I am trying to figure out which is the latest stable version of VM.

The virtuemart.net site offers 3.0.14 for download but i can see that there are other versions released after that in the dev.virtuemart.net site.
Though none of them indicates in the file name, it's maturity (alpha, beta, rc, etc.)  neither there is any relevant tag.

So how can somebody identify the maturity of a version?
Also why not using semantic versioning , to make it more comprehensive?

[GJC Web Design]

As I understand it 3.0.16 is to be used with J3.5.1 IF u don't want to do the email hack

It was a fairly quick fix, so is soft released

3.0.17 is under extensive testing now and it will become 3.0.18 stable I assume and get a hard release

I am building all my new sites on 3.0.16 without problems although some say there are some edge probs..

[Studio 42]

I am building all my new sites on 3.0.16 without problems although some say there are some edge probs..

Most of problem are internal code changes used by third party devs and templates(eg image thumbs, prices ...), i had myself some issue, because i only needed thumbs url, and old code was not working.

[balai]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

I think that the versioning should be comprehensive either to a newbie.
I have seen many posts asking the same question which is a proof that it's not comprehensive.

[Milbo]

We follow mainly semver.org, which is also somewhere described

[balai]

We follow mainly semver.org, which is also somewhere described

The main concern in your versioning, is that pre-releases have no any lexical identifier that states their maturity.
This can cause confusion to someone not familiar with your versioning pattern.

[Milbo]

We really often stated it. Uneven numbers are prereleases. Sometimes it gets the label RC, release candidate. This means that the code should be good enough for live shops.

Even numbers are "stable" releases. I added this information to general concepts
"The installers for Joomla are provided in a com_virtuemart.x.y.z_extract_first.zip. The z stands for the subversion, packages with even numbers are released for production. Packages ending with an uneven number are prereleases for testing. After extraction you will find three files"
http://docs.virtuemart.net/manual/general-concepts/218-installation-updating.html

[balai]

I still think that this is not easily comprehensive for the outsider and can be done much simpler.
The decision is yours