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Prepare version scheme for 17.0 release

Placeholder github Source User requested to merge github/fork/maflcko/Mf1712-version17 into master

This prepares the version scheme for the upcoming 17.0.0 release (formerly known as 0.17.0). After branching off 0.16.0, we could start referring to master as 16.99.0.

The current version scheme is 0.MAJOR.MINOR, c.f. https://bitcoincore.org/en/lifecycle/#versioning. The proposed version scheme is MAJOR.MINOR.0, i.e. dropping the constant prefix 0..

Participants of #9653 (closed) also proposed other versioning schemes, which come with downsides:

  • The version scheme MAJOR_YEAR.MAJOR_MONTH.MINOR, where MAJOR_YEAR and MAJOR_MONTH refer to when the release cycle started. For version numbers to be predictable (like they are for ubuntu), we'd had to either prepare a release every 6 months or come up with a name for "the next version". Neither solution is feasible for this project.
  • The 1.0.0 version scheme. This is also infeasible as outlined in https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/9653#issuecomment-276125338 and subsequent comments.

So I'd propose to stick with the existing version scheme or drop the leading zero.

EDIT: Obviously, this does not mean Bitcoin Core is all of a sudden less experimental than before.

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