Out of curiosity: I can remember we once changed the versioning to yy.mm.<update#> or so. Any reason, why we went away from that and are back to random versioning?
#Non-tech - Collection Versioning
tame echo
soft talon
Yes, we initially decided YY.MM.PATCH when we started the collection, but 2-3 years ago, Redhat required us to follow their semantic versioning so all collections follow the same versioning convention. That's Major.Minor.Patch (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/community/collection_contributors/collection_releasing.html#collection-versioning-and-deprecation).
We were not allowed to start back to 1 since 21 was already listed as a major change in their system, and we couldn't have a lower number than that.
You must document a major breaking change to increment a major release. So we ended up leaving Major at 21 and incrementing minor past 12 after the end of the year. When the default for all modules was switched from ZAPI to REST major, it was incremented to 22.
tame echo
Thanks for that very detailed answer Chris. Very helpful and nobody can blame NetApp for volatile naming/versioning 😁