comes from the Gnits standards.
There is no such thing as "Gnits standards". I was/am a founding member
of "gnits" (which was just a few friends talking informally), and I can
state this authoritatively :).
Before automake existed, there were various
autoconf/installation/etc. conventions that a few of us developed and
followed, for personal amusement as much as anything. They were never
written down or made official in any way, partly because Tom implemented
them in the early days of automake, so they didn't need a separate
existence :).
In fact, the whole gnits thing should probably be eradicated from
automake, except for historical purposes.
Maybe we should have a way to tell Automake about the version
numbering scheme used by a package?
Well, if you want to make work for yourself :). What seems most logical
to me is for automake to implement the GNU standard in these matters, at
least as the default. Which is actually written down.
Karl> Did anyone ever make a test release with a version number like 4.5.1?
Coreutils.
Jim will never do it again :).
