Writing this to encourage discussion of two issues I hope to solve with a single PR:

1. There is no way to tell whether a version string is a SemVer v1, 2 or whatever is next string.
2. There have been many updates to v2 that did not get an appropriate patch or minor level bump and that should not ever happen again.

As far as I can tell, prior to @mojombo 's handoff of SemVer to @haacked, every update to the SemVer document was properly versioned. Since the first 2.0.0 release, there have been many minor and patch level changes to the document without any document version bumps. I've read arguments that this practice somehow promoted stability, but I think it can be argued that SemVer 2.0.0 is in fact unstable, since documentation that pointed to the original 2.0.0 no longer points to that document at all.

There are many open pull requests in the queue, a few of which should probably be merged, but not before we solve the disambiguation problem and return to bumping the document version number. I propose that the next versioned update should be a major version bump that resolves the disambiguation problem by adding a version meta tag to the string:

    <version> [prerelease] [buildmeta] {SemverX}
    <version> [prerelease] [buildmeta] {SemVerX.Y}

This is identical to what I've already proposed for VersionMeta, but we don't have to sign-up for that explicitly, we can define those as referencing the appropriate semver.org/spec documents.

I suspect that if the new tag is required to have whitespace in front of it, then a lot of the tooling out there will simply ignore the tag and it devolves to a decoration for human consumption. In any case, I'll be happy to go author PR's for the major packaging silos to include support for this as an experimental feature for the various ecosystems to try out.

After this proposed update is merged, all future updates should be versioned appropriately. These two things will allow for minor updates that add backwards compatible features as well as major updates that really break things and allow for the evolution of version meta aware tooling to correctly parse and operate on the various syntaxes and semantics correctly.