Review Versioning Schemes

[Carsons-Eels]

Right now the versioning between EELS/EEST is not clearly aligned. We need to look at how to make these compatible and understandable for clients. There should ideally be no confusion about how the versions relate to each other. More discussion is required.

[marioevz]

Mainnet: EEST adops EELS versioning scheme

EIPs, Features: We create tags in EELS which triggers an eest-only release.

[SamWilsn]

So the plan, as far as I understand:

Post-Weld we use EELS's versioning, but bump major to 6..

Non-mainnet releases get an @ as used by EEST today.

[github-actions]

This issue has had no activity for 60 days and has been marked as stale.

[Carsons-Eels]

I was spinning up a PR for this but I ran into a consideration I want feedback on first.

Right now we version as COMPAT.FORK.PATCH

We are going to have a ton of BPO forks between now and whenever (if ever) we get automated Blob Parameter adjustments. This sets us up for bumping the MINOR version pretty frequently, every time we BPO fork. It's fine, but it does kind of confuse things a bit I think. I'd rather the minor version only refer to named true mainnet hard forks rather than include BPO forks because it makes the minor version feel inflated to me. BPO forks do not meaningfully change the code in a way. I feel like bumping the minor version for these is misleading.

I get that EIP-7892 defines BPO forks as hardforks, and that makes sense in the context of mainnet and the blockchain, but I don't think it makes sense here where it should indicate a change in code.

We also run parallel versioning tracks for BAL, ZKEVM, Benchmarking, devnets, etc. These mostly all use SEMVER except for BAL which bases it's versions on fixture format compatibility I think. I'm fine with keeping the versioning for those separate, that makes sense. We should perhaps do a better job of documenting those and their versioning schemes so it's a bit easier to navigate this repo though.

I think that moving forward, the MINOR version equivalent should be reserved for named mainnet hard forks.

We also don't really use the PATCH version very much, actually virtually never. We should consider if BPO fits better under there along with hotfixes (like v2.19.1), spec corrections, major tooling bug fixes, and test fixture regeneration.

What say ye?

Edit: I spun up a draft PR for upgrading to 6.19.0.