[RFC] leverage `semver2` gem to manage versions

[majormoses]

Rather than manually managing the version in files I think we should use semver2 gem there are several benefits to this:

• programmatic bumping of versions
• easier to potentially update changelog (insert diff links and such)

I have used it on several other projects and it has worked fairly nicely. I don't think it would be too much effort to start leveraging the biggest pain is automating the change across ~200 repos.

But I think it would look something like this:

• in gemspec require 'semver'
• in gemspec s.add_development_dependency 'semver2', '~> 3.4'
• in gemspec s.version = SemVer.find.format '%M.%m.%p' (might want to include special/meta/pre?)
• for migration we would want to a semver init, read in the current version from the class, and write it back out to the .semver file. This can be easily done programmatically.

[jspaleta]

hey @majormoses,
That sounds interesting. Is there a documented policy concerning the intended semantic versioning that is happening manually now?

[majormoses]

Currently we have a document describing how we version

Regarding the current process at least for plugins (extensions have not been updated yet):

• update the version file manually
• update 2 locations in the changelog

Here is a random example

My thought is if we have a programmatic interface to updating the version file we can apply that to the changelog as well via a rake task (or similar) so doing a version bump for a release can be an automated process as sometimes I forget to update all 3 locations.