This prompted me to look up Node's versioning style to see if it had a name, but I couldn't find one.

What I did learn is how in Node.js even numbered releases are stable and odd numbered releases are unstable. That seems pretty odd to me (no pun intended), is this normal?

It's copied from the linux kernel - http://www.linfo.org/kernel_version_numbering.html

We should clarify that Linux no longer uses that version numbering system.

Also Perl: 5.20 is current stable, 5.21 is unstable but will eventually lead to 5.22.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#How-often-are-new-vers...

yeah, node doesn't do this. node 0.12.0 should actually be (at least) node 5.0, if they followed semver.

I think religious following of semver doesn't matter, but semver says that pre 1.0 numbers are essentially meaningless so nodejs might be actually following it correctly.

> Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything may change at any time. The public API should not be considered stable.

I think not:

> if your software is being used in production, it should probably already be 1.0.0. If you have a stable API on which users have come to depend, you should be 1.0.0. If you're worrying a lot about backwards compatibility, you should probably already be 1.0.0.

So, either they are using 0.y.z to allow themselves breaking changes whenever, or they are using it as a signal that it's not production-ready, or they are not following semantic versioning.

Is there another alternative?