All I know is our development team is doing some of this for custom Linux images for a proprietary IIOT platform. We have an arm67 and x64 hardware. The arm hardware is our old platform running a very old OS and the x64 is our new hardware that only runs Linux.

The version of the image is a timestamp like this.

20241127214906

Then in documentation it is sometimes described as 1.1

Looking at that timestamp tells me nothing other than the time it was built. It gives zero context when deployed to production units and determining what it actually is. Our developers provide no central source of truth about the mapping of a timestamp to a version now that we are converting units to production for customers.

/etc/release is supposed to indicate the version and it contains a timestamp of 20241127214906. And what is our customer to make of that?

It is extremely frustrating and I really don’t understand why this is being done. Going forward this is going to be a mess.

Versions of products built via a devOps platform, should always allow cross references to a version and builds over time till formal gold master release.