Hacker News Reader

dates. dates are good. YYYY.MM.patch.

Why? There is value in having some sort of easily identifiable ordering to versions

Absolutely. I was being sarcastic. I'm not fond of this rabid incrementation that originated with Chrome.

Why would anyone want to use Ubuntu 4ee7bb27a0ff1cbc203a0df93919980ccbcfd4f1 over Ubuntu 22.04?

You should work for Asus.

How would that work for deprecations and new API introductions? GNOME is built on top of glib/gobject/gtk and a host of other libraries which all have to be ABI-compatible in some way. And GNOME itself is used as a base platform for applications.

Having a predictable versioning scheme helps limit the number of releases for downstream application maintenance work. You can't expect applications to have the full git tree available at build or runtime to make some features conditionally available.