I dunno, man; I'm not a programmer but I'm on three different closed NDA betas (and four or five open ones) and the process is exactly this:

PRO TOOLS 12.8.2x147

Where

- "12" is the version Marketing is using for an overarching major paradigm change with major improvements (v12 has track freeze, a new video engine, a rewritten audio engine and robust improvements to the workspace)

- ".8" is the version Marketing is using for a bundled suite of improvements over .7, for example (predictive labeling, revised I/O manager, etc)

- ".2" is the version Engineering is putting out of assorted bug fixes and minor improvements

- "x147" is the internal build number we're all working on to try and break/fix prior to release candidate and gold master for distribution to all users

Anything that works with 12.1 will work with 12.7 will work with 12.8, but there will be compatibility issues with 11. Meanwhile, 12.8.2 is going to be an incremental improvement over 12.8.1 and the xVersions nobody external is going to see anyway.

And it works just fine. I mean, we all know that the best performance we ever got was 7.4.2 but we also know that it ran on RISC processors and used a plugin structure we abandoned in 2009 and that was back before we were expected to work with 150 tracks on a bloody short film.

Again - not a programmer but this stuff makes perfect sense to me.