This appears to be a slight variation on the version numbering scheme used by Apple and many of its third party developers, which I have personally used at a couple of companies over dozens of products with great success, ie <major>.<minor>.<subminor><stage><release>. On the Mac, this format is directly supported by the 'vers' resource and editable by tools like ResEdit, thus encouraging standardization.
If we're seriously looking for something to replace the current system with only a slight detour, I would agree with Craig that something like this is a pretty good candidate. I would also propose that such a scheme be supported by the stock image with appropriate classes as we evolve toword better version management and modules/packages/namespaces/isolations/whatever.
-- Duane
Craig Latta writes:
Once again I humbly suggest using the release naming scheme described at http://netjam.org/self/projects/smalltalk. I find it easier and more useful than any of the alternatives I've seen so far.