IMO the best versioning convention is YYYYMMDDNN, where NN is the release number you did that day (and so is typically 0). With this, it's trivial to generate

IMO the best versioning convention is YYYYMMDDNN, where NN is the release number you did that day (and so is typically 0). With this, it's trivial to generate new version numbers, there's no version number angst, and version numbers are inherently ordered. Detractors will argue that this system doesn't convey compatibility or magnitude-of-change information, but that's a feature.