The notion of "final" is very much an emotional, kind of mindset, one. In any kind of research there's this impending mental final frontier, which is often tied

The notion of "final" is very much an emotional, kind of mindset, one. In any kind of research there's this impending mental final frontier, which is often tied to some concluded stage. It's similar somewhat to a "release", but as such there's no real product notion. Also, the "final" is usually what one may submit for a review, then the remarks may just be relating to _that_ "final", quite logically creating another train-car in the filename. I also encouraged colleagues to date-version in such cases, but this eventually leads to multiple date-stamped train. A curious thing is that rarely the researchers get back to those older versions, they just keep them and as easily forget about why they kept them, once the reasearch is pushed out. So my solition back then was letting them do their thing as they see fit within the project area till the conclusion, then round out all the related artifacts and stuff them into a repo. Any revisions then get added to that repo, as well as any remarks about what/when was submitted to where/whom. Loosely structured and messy, but hopefully internally relevant and consistent. The main goal - preserve first, then rearrange, if needed.