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TrunkVer

TrunkVer is a SemVer-compatible versioning scheme for continuously-delivered, trunk-based applications and systems that don't follow a release scheme.

Historically, countless versioning schemes have been used to signify changes to a piece of software, using a lot of not clearly defined words such as beta, final or release candidate as well as arbitrary numbering schemes that typically involve one or more digits that are incremented according to certain rules, or worse, without clear rules. However, we keep encountering teams and organizations that apply semantic versioning or a custom versioning scheme to software that does not need any of that - and through this, they create an astonishing amount of unnecessary work such as arguing whether or not a certain piece of software should be called “alpha”, “beta”, “rho”, “really final v4” etc, manually creating tickets listing the changes or even specialized gatekeeper roles such as “release engineer” - in the worst case a single person in the whole organization. In an organization that creates software in teams of trusted contributors that deploy software to controlled environments together, this kind of versioning ceremony can become a major hurdle to adopting the XP and DevOps practices of trunk-based development and continuous integration/deployment/delivery - and it can and should be replaced by a tiny amount of code.

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