Importance of a version policy

• It is important to use an precise well documented Versioning Policy for software and sometimes hardware development, so that everyone can see the exact status of the software.
• Basically, I find it better to use a simple versioning scheme, since, for example, a date-based versioning does not provide any information about the status of the software.
  • For example, it is difficult to determine whether version 2026.1 is a new generation of the software, only has bugs fixed in this release, or is the version even an LTS version. Is the software still in the alpha stage?
  • Another example for unclear of versions are build numbers / ids.