What do PhotoStructure version numbers mean?

Hello @mrm,

Thank you for your tireless work on PS, what you are doing is truly remarkable.

I was meaning to ask if you could clarify more the versioning of PS. I spent a lot of time searching far and wide on the forum, on the site, on Reddit, and am still unable to fully wrap my head around it.

The information is there, but it’s scattered across many pages on your site and on sometimes a little unclear. I understand it’s hard to keep docs up to date. If there is any way any of us could help you, perhaps by having your documentation site forkable on Github?

Here is my latest confusing experience below. I have been a subscriber since v1 and recently decided to finally throw PS at my NAS… and found a bit of a “fog of docs” situation, which I think could be much improved and maybe even lead to more customers :slight_smile:

I am currently running photostructure/server:latest on my Syno, which reports itself as 2.1.0-alpha.7.

I understand that since August '23 you switched to Calendar Versioning, but there are still popular releases that use the old versioning scheme. No CalVer releases appear to be alpha, are they all prealpha still?

I am also aware of the yearly Release Notes posts on your site, like PhotoStructure | 2023 PhotoStructure release notes. While comprehensive, it’s not clear what prealpha actually means. Are there four version tiers or should prealpha be ignored as too dangerous? It looks like you are putting a ton of work on prealpha!

  • prealpha
  • alpha
  • beta
  • stable

The site’s homepage still lists 1.1 as the latest desktop package — I understand this is due to more work required to get the 2.x branch to work robustly on macOS and Windows.

In one post here on the forum you say that you are running the latest Alpha release on your Synology NAS, and many users also recommend running the Alphas because despite the scary label they are more stable and much improved over stable

In Alpha, beta, stable, and latest; What should you use? there is no mention of what latest means (maybe I missed it?). Is it latest Alpha? Latest CalVer? I now know because I have it running, but only just now realised that alpha.7 is from a year ago.

Overall I think that a OSS-style revamp of PS’s documentation could do a lot for the project. Could something like https://docusaurus.io help?