$ ./arduino-cli version
arduino-cli alpha Version: 0.0.0-git Commit: 
$ ./arduino-cli version --format json
{
 "Application": "arduino-cli",
 "VersionString": "0.0.0-git",
 "Commit": ""
}

what about adding a field like "Status": "alpha"?
We may change it to beta and stable as it goes.

$ ./arduino-cli version
arduino-cli alpha Version: 0.0.0-git Commit: 
$ ./arduino-cli version --format json
{
 "Application": "arduino-cli",
 "VersionString": "0.0.0-git",
 "Commit": ""
}

what about adding a field like "Status": "alpha"?
We may change it to beta and stable as it goes.

Right! Didn't think about the JSON output.

@cmaglie @silvanocerza
doesn't hurt :)

What do you think about programmatically interpreting status from the version, according to semver? Something like:

• 0.14.0-rc2: alpha, pre-release
• 0.14.0: alpha
• 1.0.0-rc4: stable, pre-release
• 1.0.0: stable

It's mostly the stable pre-release where I think this would be important, because it would be strange to mark a pre-release as "stable". So not necessarily something to do right now, but maybe worth considering.

Ideally, there would be a different status for the nightly/test builds.

• 0.14.0-rc2: alpha, pre-release
• 0.14.0: alpha

What semver will indicate the Beta state?

AFAIK, there is no concept of alpha/beta in semver. There is only unstable (0.y.z) and stable. So the switch from alpha to beta would just be a matter of manually changing the string whenever that point is deemed to have been reached. With the multi-word status approach, the switch from "beta" to "stable" would only happen once, so that might as well be done manually as well.

It's with the non-release versions that the programmatical status determination becomes useful, since it would not make sense to do that manually.

Actually there is, see this: https://semver.org/#spec-item-9
We only use X.Y.Z though so it wouldn't work I think.