My understanding (from looking at the git source control) is that (currently) when a release of nopcommerce is to be made, that the develop branch is merged into master, the commit is tagged (e.g. "release-4.20") and the release made ready for downloading on the NopCommerce website.
Following this, my understanding then is that if any further fixes are to be applied to the release, the change is made directly to master (as in commit b8e9480) or to develop and all of develop is then merged into master (as in merge commit 4ed0557). I believe that this version of master is then released to the NopCommerce website and no tag is made in source control. I believe that the version number of the software is not incremented and thus remains set to the previous version number (in this case 4.20).
Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.
I downloaded the release of NopCommerce 4.20 on 28 May 2019 (the original release date) and then revisited the NopCommerce download page on 23 June 2019. The latest version to download was still 4.20 but when I downloaded it and performed a comparison with the original release (on 28 May) it was different. The source code available for download on 23 June was the same version as that in the latest release of master. So the version currently available to download is not 4.20 but something like 4.20.3 or similar.
Suggestion: Use an additional version number
Would it not be better to include an additional version number? So the first release of 4.20 would be 4.20.0, followed by 4.20.1 etc.
I assume that with plugin versioning you would still need to internally maintain the versions of 4.20 but for the end user downloading from the website, wouldn't it be useful to indicate somehow that a new release has been made?