Problem

With docker, there is the golang:1.20 tag which refers to the latest release of the 1.20 branch. In contrast, the release named go1.20 refer to the initial 1.20 release only, creating the issue that depending on context, the term "go 1.20" may refer to either initial 1.20 release or latest 1.20 release.

Solution

Make the initial release of a branch have a .0 suffix, for example 1.21.0.

• 1.21.0 will unambigously refer to the first release of the 1.21 branch.
• 1.21 will be unambigously refer to the 1.21 branch and match the docker tag.
• It would enable the creation of stable 1.21 download links that match the docker tags.
• Versions with stable number of parts are easier to parse.

Considerations

• Any tooling that relies on the inital branch release having no suffix will need to be updated

Prior Art

I'd like to highlight the Node.js project which also implements this versioning scheme and it has been working very well for them. In the JS ecosystem a version number always comprises of three parts which comes from SemVer.