Calendar Versioning

2026-09-11T07:00:00Z

CalVer is a versioning convention based on your project's release calendar.
Versioning gets better with time.

For maintainers, versioning allows us to specify precise dependencies within an ever-expanding ecosystem. For sellers and promoters, a project's version is a dynamic part of a brand. For all of us, versioning lets us reference the past while upgrading to the future.

Different projects use different systems for versioning, but common practices have emerged. For instance, point-separated numbers (e.g., 3.1.4) are all but given. Another common versioning pattern incorporates a time-based element, usually part of the release date.

This date-based approach is called Calendar Versioning, or CalVer for short.

Contents

Scheme
Case studies
Badges
Frequently Asked Questions
Spec changelog

Scheme

There are multiple calendar versioning schemes, long used by projects big and small. Rather than declaring a single scheme to be CalVer, it's important to recognize the practicality of each and design the scheme to fit the project. First, the parts of the version:

Major - The first number in the version. 2 and 3 are Python's famous major versions. The major segment is the most common calendar-based component.
Minor - The second number in the version. The 7 in Python 2.7 is its minor version.
Micro - The third and usually final number in the version. Sometimes referred to as the "patch" segment.
Modifier - An optional text tag, such as "dev", "alpha", "beta", "rc1", and so on.

The vast majority of modern version identifiers are composed of two or three numeric segments, plus the optional modifier. Convention suggests that four-numeric-segment versions are discouraged.

As seen in the case studies below, projects have found more than one useful way to leverage dates in their versions. Rather than choose a single scheme, CalVer introduces standard terminology for developers, in addition to the "semantic" versions:

YYYY - Full year - 2006, 2016, 2106
YY - Short year - 6, 16, 106
0Y - Zero-padded year - 06, 16, 106
M - Short month - 1, 2 ... 11, 12
0M - Zero-padded month - 01, 02 ... 11, 12
W - Short week (since start of year) - 1, 2, 33, 52
0W - Zero-padded week - 01, 02, 33, 52
D - Short day - 1, 2 ... 30, 31
0D - Zero-padded day - 01, 02 ... 30, 31

A few real versions, decomposed:

26.04 is YY.0M (Ubuntu)
2026.2 is YYYY.MINOR (JetBrains, Kali Linux)
2026.08.19 is YYYY.0M.0D (yt-dlp)

A single letter is the plain number, and a leading 0 marks zero-padding, so each token reads only one way. Earlier revisions of this page spelled the short forms with doubled letters; see the note below.

Note that traditional, incremented version numbers are 0-based, whereas date segments are 1-based, and the short and zero-padded years are relative to the year 2000. YY and 0Y only produce different strings for the years 2000-2009 and 2100 onward: Ubuntu's first release, 4.10 (October 2004), is YY.0M, and C++03 is 0Y.

Trailing optional segments are written in square brackets, so YYYY.0M.0D[.MICRO] is a date version that sometimes carries a fourth number, as yt-dlp's does.

Weeks deserve caution. There are several definitions in common use (strftime's %W counts Monday-started weeks from 00, %U does the same from Sunday, and ISO 8601's %V runs 01 through 53 with its own week-based year), and depending on the definition a year can have as many as 54 numbered weeks. A project using weeks should state which definition it means. Usage of weeks is mutually exclusive with months and days.

MM, WW, and DD are deprecated. From 2016 until spec 26.0, this page wrote the short month, week, and day with doubled letters. Those spellings keep that meaning, so existing badges and tool configs still read correctly: YY.MM.MICRO is YY.M.MICRO. They are deprecated because most date formats (ISO 8601's YYYY-MM-DD, Java, moment.js, day.js) read a doubled letter as two digits, so a reader can't tell which is meant. Write M, W, and D for short values and 0M, 0W, and 0D for zero-padded ones. Tools that implement the doubled spellings (bumpver, bump-my-version, JReleaser, and others) keep working; as they add the single letters, prefer those. See the spec changelog.

The Gregorian calendar is assumed, as is the convention of UTC. Technically any calendar can be used, provided projects state which one.

Case studies

CalVer has quite a few users. These are projects selected for their notability and variety of use cases.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu, one of the most prominent Linux-based operating systems available, uses a three-segment CalVer scheme, with a short year and zero-padded month. It has done so from the very start, in October 2004, making 4.10 the first general release of Ubuntu.

Even a simple operating system involves many, many parts, making it difficult to communicate much meaning with an arbitrary number. By dating the project release, the calendar-based version is much more than an arbitrary number, communicating useful information that is rooted in simple fact.

Ubuntu derives additional benefit from its CalVer scheme, by integrating it with their support schedule. Ubuntu currently has five-year support periods for their long-term support (LTS) releases, and only 9 months for non-LTS releases. Thanks to CalVer and elementary arithmetic, any user can easily determine whether their version is still supported. The current LTS release at the time of writing, 26.04 LTS, will be supported until 2031.

Apple

Measured by devices, probably the largest calendar versioning adoption to date.

At WWDC in June 2025, Apple moved every one of its operating systems to a single year-based number: iOS 18 became iOS 26, macOS 15 became macOS 26, and iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS made the same jump, with Xcode 26 and Safari 26 following. Releases are numbered by the following year, so WWDC 2026 brought iOS version 27, confirming the pattern is annual.

In CalVer terms, the scheme is YY.MINOR with the year offset by one: the calendar supplies the major version, point releases counting up as deemed fit. Eminently marketing-friendly, finally embracing the brand's maturity.

The advantage is the same Ubuntu found decades before: One number tells a customer, a developer, or a support engineer how current any Apple platform is, with versions lining up across platforms instead of drifting (who wants to remember that iOS 18 coincided with macOS 15 and watchOS 11).

NVIDIA

NVIDIA runs calendar versions across much of its infrastructure software. The GPU Operator for Kubernetes went from SemVer 1.11 to 22.9.0 in September 2022, with a new major every six months and a twelve-month support window, so the version alone tells an operator when support ends. RAPIDS, the CUDA data science libraries, jumped from 0.19 to 21.06.00 in June 2021. The NGC deep-learning containers (PyTorch, TensorFlow, TensorRT, Triton) have shipped monthly as YY.0M since at least 19.08. Legate uses YY.0M.PP with .devXXX weeklies and promises API and ABI stability within each month version.

Interestingly, NVIDIA uses both padded and unpadded CalVer. GPU Operator is unpadded to stay compatible with semantic versioning. RAPIDS, NGC, and Legate pad, because their versions are container tags that sort as strings.

To decide for your use case, see To pad or not to pad?.

Twisted

Twisted, the venerated Python networking and asynchronous execution framework, uses a three-segment CalVer scheme, with a short year in the major version slot, short month in the minor version slot, and micro/patch version in the third and final slot.

First released in 2002 and still actively developed today (26.4.0 at the time of writing), Twisted is a mature library that has grown to match its large scope. It features everything from an IRC client to an HTTP server to a slew of utilities for concurrent programming. Like an operating system, Twisted has a lot of parts, making SemVer a poor fit due to the individual parts deprecating and breaking compatibility individually.

The non-deprecated parts of Twisted are backwards-compatible between each successive version, and breaking changes are done on a time basis, where one year must pass and two releases issued between the release deprecating the functionality and the removal of the functionality.

Its versioning scheme has spread to related projects, including Klein, Treq, and even one of Twisted's dependencies, PyOpenSSL.

yt-dlp

yt-dlp, the community successor to youtube-dl and understated ally of Internet media archivists everywhere, continues the tradition of using CalVer. youtube-dl pioneered the scheme, a full date with a micro segment appended when a same-day fix is needed. yt-dlp forked in January 2021 and kept going, tagging 2026.08.19 in the usual style.

Despite the name, yt-dlp's scope is expansive. It supports extracting audio and video from a long, ever-expanding list of sites. Consider the rapid release cycle of supported services and the surface area of "breaking" changes, and it becomes clear why the project has adopted CalVer to such a great degree.

The tags are zero-padded, but PyPI lists the same release as 2026.8.19, the PEP 440-normalized form. It is a live illustration of the padding note below: the two strings are one version.

The IANA/Olson timezone database

The IANA/Olson timezone database represents the history of local time for many representative locations around the globe, and is the source of truth for essentially every operating system, database, website, or other computer that deals with timezones or daylight savings time.

It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies to time zone boundaries, UTC offsets, and daylight-saving rules. Because these changes follow political and legislative whim rather than a fixed schedule, the database is versioned with a four-digit year followed by lower-case letter (a through z, then za through zz, then zza through zzz, and so on). Calendar versioning offers a date-stamped snapshot of an otherwise chaotic system.

Other notable projects

boltons - YY.MINOR.MICRO - A broad library of utilities supplementing the Python standard library.
certifi - YYYY.0M.0D - certifi is a wrapper around Mozilla's certificate authority bundle, used for secure Internet communication. Similar to the IANA timezone database, certificate updates do not follow a fixed schedule, but timely, dateable updates are critical to security.
CockroachDB - YY.MINOR.MICRO - Distributed SQL database, on CalVer since 19.1.
fusefs-ntfs - YYYY.M.D_MICRO - One of the earliest and most cross-compatible NTFS access layers for Unix systems.
Home Assistant - YYYY.M.MICRO - Open-source home automation platform, released monthly since 2020.12.
JetBrains IDEs - YYYY.MINOR.MICRO - IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and the rest of the family, since 2016.1.
LibreOffice - YY.M - free and powerful office suite, and a successor to OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice).
OpenSCAD - YYYY.0M - The premiere open-source offering for solid 3D CAD modelling.
pip - YY.MINOR.MICRO - Official package manager for Python.
Stripe's API - YYYY-0M-0D.MODIFIER - An API-first payments platform. Integrations pin a dated API version; since 2024 the twice-yearly breaking releases carry a plant name, as in 2024-09-30.acacia.

See the Users page for a growing list of CalVer users.

Badges

The scheme badges on this page are stock shields.io static images, and any project can mint one. Put your scheme in the middle segment of the URL, and link the image here so your readers can decode the notation:

[![CalVer - YYYY.M.D](https://img.shields.io/badge/calver-YYYY.M.D-22bfda.svg)](https://calver.org/)

Dots pass through badge URLs untouched. A literal dash must be doubled (--), and square brackets are percent-encoded, as in yt-dlp's YYYY.0M.0D%5B.MICRO%5D above.

Frequently Asked Questions

And their answers, in time.

When to use CalVer?

If third parties use your project, then use a serious version.

Luckily, the decision on whether to use CalVer is easier than ever:

Does your project feature a large or constantly-changing scope?
- Large systems and frameworks, like Ubuntu and Twisted.
- Amorphous sets of utilities, like Boltons.
- Non-technical audiences, who shouldn't have to understand if a change is "breaking", as in Apple's iOS.
Is your project time-sensitive in any way? Do other external changes drive new project releases?
- Business requirements, such as Ubuntu's focus on support schedules.
- Security updates, such as certifi's need to update certificates.
- Political shifts, such as the IANA database's handling of timezone changes.

If you answered yes to any of these questions, CalVer's semantics make it a strong choice for your project. You can even have your agent adopt it for you, the CalVer SKILL.md.

What about breaking changes?

CalVer deliberately does not attempt to communicate breaking changes. That's because there's never been consensus on what counts as a breaking change, especially in mature, widely-adopted systems. Some versioned objects don't even have breaking changes, such as informational documents. There is no substitute for a changelog and policy. Pair a calendar version with a time-based deprecation policy and you're in good graces: Twisted requires one year and two releases between deprecating something and removing it. Further discussion in GitHub Issue #4.

Multiple releases per day?

Append an incrementing micro segment, YYYY.M.D.MICRO: 2026.9.11, then 2026.9.11.1. Intra-day timestamps trade readability for still-limited resolution (two releases in the same minute) or a version that grows too long. Humans don't convert a second-counter to a wall clock in their heads. Further discussion in #49 and #62.

To pad or not to pad?

Short version: Unless your versions commonly appear as filenames to the end reader, unpadded is the sensible default. YYYY.M.D, not YYYY.0M.0D.

The longer explanation is that most version comparators already treat 04 and 4 as the same number. dpkg and rpm compare numerically, and PEP 440 normalizes leading zeros away, so PyPI shows 2025.4 whether you pad or not.

Padding is problematic in a lot of systems, because a padded segment is invalid SemVer ("MUST NOT contain leading zeroes"). Cargo and Go both enforce strict SemVer, so definitely don't pad there. NVIDIA's GPU Operator uses CalVer and puts it this way: "Zero padding is omitted for month to be still compatible with semantic versioning."

Zero-padding makes the most sense when versions will commonly live in filenames, image tags, or object-store keys that get listed lexically. With padding, 26.04 stays sorted ahead of 26.10. This is probably why Ubuntu, NixOS, the Arch Linux ISOs, and NVIDIA's monthly NGC containers pad. Pad when it helps your users to have the basic lexical sort work out of the box.

Spec changelog

26.0 (2026): short month, week, and day are written M, W, and D (the synonymous doubled MM, WW, and DD are deprecated due to ambiguity). Optional segments in square brackets. Padding guidance. Case studies and users refreshed for a decade of adoption.
19.7 (2019): revised text, case studies, and users list.
16.6 (2016): original publication.