Just an idea, even if it may not sound as cool: Why not use a number YYYY.mmm.dd.seq (seq being the ordinal number of the commit within a 24h UTC period starti

Just an idea, even if it may not sound as cool: Why not use a number YYYY.mmm.dd.seq (seq being the ordinal number of the commit within a 24h UTC period starting at 00:00Z), and you would get something that is relatively easily parsed by humans (you can omit year/month when talking about recent releases), has a simple 1:1 mapping to the git commit, and has the added benefit of being easily sortable - if you zero-pad the numbers, it will become lexicographically sortable without losing much readability. This assumes you only release from one branch, of course.