How should I represent the local patched version of a project?

Question

Let's say that ServiceA, that I work on, uses ProjectB version 1.5.0. We don't quite use it vanilla; we have some patches that we reapply when we integrate new versions of ProjectB; we don't really think of this as a private fork. We proudly announce in various contexts that we use ProjectB.

What is the best way to represent that we're not using ProjectB 1.5.0 the way you'd get it out-of-the-box? Should we say we use:

1. ProjectB 1.5.0-suffix
2. ProjectB prefix-1.5.0
3. ProjectB-suffix 1.5.0
4. prefix-ProjectB 1.5.0
5. Just ProjectB 1.5.0 and don't worry about it
6. Something else?

(If you recommend a suffix or prefix, what?)

Answer 1

I prefer option 1:

ProjectB 1.5.0-suffix

since then you can easily add versioning onto the suffix. For example:

ProjectB 1.5.0-ServiceA-0.1

This way you can specify a patch version as well. So if you update the patch then you'll have:

ProjectB 1.5.0-ServiceA-0.2 etc...

Answer 2

I would use option 1.

Being a Linux developer, I tend to use the same kind of format that distributions like redhat/fedora or ubuntu may use, where they append their "patched version" to the end of the upstream source version number.

something like projectb-1.5.0-23 would be the 23 revision of my patches to projectb-1.5.0.

everything before your version is untouched, and should be recognizable by anyone else using the project.