Introduce semantic versioning for APIB

draft/semantic-versioning.md

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+RFC: XXXX
+Author: Kyle Fuller
+Status: Draft
+Created: 2015-02-04
+Last Modified: 2015-02-04
+---
+
+# API Blueprint RFC XXXX: Semantic Versioning
+
+## Table of Contents
+
+- [Abstract](#abstract)
+- [Motivation](#motivation)
+- [Rationale](#rationale)
+- [Backwards Compatibility](#backwards-compatibility)
+
+## Abstract
+
+This RFC proposes that the API Blueprint language and specification are
+versioned via [Semantic Versioning](http://semver.org), and there is a
+[CHANGELOG](https://github.com/kylef/changelog) file including a list of
+changes for each release.
+
+## Motivation
+
+Currently API Blueprint uses a non-standard version format such as `1A9` which
+is vastly different from version numbers elsewhere. The benefits of semantic
+versioning is that anyone can understand the types of changes in major, minor
+or patch releases, while that isn't possible using our current release
+versioning.
+
+Semantic versioning would bring API Blueprint's versioning to the same format
+as used by the wide range of tooling and parsers for API Blueprint.
+
+## Backwards Compatibility
+
+This is entirely backwards compatible, since the previous released versions are
+the same and this only affects upcoming versions.