Versioning schema and mechanism

[tkurki]

The output formats of analyzer, especially the JSON output and pgns.json|xml, constitute a public API that other software depend on. Changes like 9dc6a4b break things downstream.

Canboat has no versioning scheme and there is no way a 3rd party app can detect what version of analyzer it is dealing with. As canboat is installed from git there should be an easier way than to refer to a specific commit to install a fixed version rather than "latest", eg. master.

I believe semantic versioning would work here.

There should be a versioning scheme and preferably release notes/changelog, manifested in

• git tags
• pgns.xml|json
• analyzer output (if json then in json format)
• changelog

[tkurki]

Nice!

Can you get the version of the various utilitirs from the command line? Useful for detecting what the user is running and prompting for upgrades.

I have found a changelog based on pull requests good bang for the buck.

• no need to write changelog by hand
• motivation to write useful PR titles and descriptions
• provides a link to the commits and their comments if you need to dig deeper

https://github.com/SignalK/signalk-server-node/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#v170-20181001-1945-0000