Here's the thing about versions: they are never "complete", Because you never have just one version. Whatever you are looking at is most likely an amalgam of m

Here's the thing about versions: they are never "complete", Because you never have just one version. Whatever you are looking at is most likely an amalgam of many different things, which all have their own versions. Your one perfect holy version number does not tell you those versions, so you have to look them up at some point (you did save the versions of all your dependencies and pack them into a BOM, right?). This trunk version similarly does not encode all the information you need. And what is it going to be used for? A python package? Every python package? A docker container? What about all the versions of stuff in that container? What about the helm chart that will ship this container, what's it's version? What about the version of all your helm charts that have been tested as working in stage before shipping them to prod? If you're going to have a "generic incremented trunk version", just make it a plain-old continuously incrementing integer (or hex, or whatever) with no semver. Because you're going to have to look up more information about what's inside it later anyway, and everything's going to have its own version as you modify individual items. Packing all this extra information in is actually counter-productive, because it's now much longer and more complex (which makes it harder to just compare a list side by side), yet it doesn't give you enough info. Ok, datestamp; where's the timezone? Ok, git sha; which repo (and has history been rewritten, or the files moved to a different repo)? Ok, CI build number; which build system (if you have multiple, or you moved from one to another)? Maybe some of it you can intuit, but eventually you'll wish it was different again. Might as well just make it a plain integer you can pass to a script that dumps out everything related to it. Semver's primary use case is not identifying what's inside or where it came from. The numbers are little more than a simple incrementor, and the use case is just a user who wants to know how afraid they should be. It's intended solely to communicate how likely this thing is to fuck your shit up. If it's a major version change, here be dragons. If it's minor, be cautious. If it's a patch, it should be harmless. Semver is a threat indicator. And it's easy to work with because it's so simple; comparing versions is easy. Comparing a wall of these TrunkVers will be like staring at The Matrix code. (SemVer's supposed to tell you what dependencies it can work with (>major, >major.minor, etc), but you still need the entire dependency DAG to have a pair of package name and version in order to make sense of it; you could do the exact same thing with a list of names and simple integers (foo >= 23456, foo<1234); now imagine with this TrunkVer (foo >= 20241127214906.0.0-g1f8292a-12058740477-1)...)