What is the reason for release versions not matching the semantic versions of rust-analyzer?

[miversen33]

Hey! I was working on setting up a script for neovim (something akin to Mason.nvim) and I noticed that automatically checking if my version of rust-analyzer is current is extremely difficult as the release version is just a date (with the actual version in the html body?). It got me curious, why did you guys go that route?

Is there pain associated with changing the release names to match the versions of each release?

Please note, I am not asking for this change, more just curious how we got here and floating the idea :)

[lnicola]

The releases are made from a GHA workflow, with the VS Code extension being the best-supported installation method. We use 0.3.xxxx for stable releases and 0.4.xxxx for nightly ones, because the Code Marketplace requires a lexicographically larger version number for pre-releases. xxxx is the GHA workflow run count, which we don't know beforehand. The GitHub release names and tags are just dates because those are easy to determine beforehand.

[miversen33]

That makes sense :) thanks for the details!