How Do I Define The Status/version Of My Software? Alpha, beta, version numbers?

I'm just wondering, how does a person give their software an Alpha, Beta, "Stable" status and a version number? I never thought much about it, but now that I'm making things that someone other then myself might use, it'd be nice to know how to give it a version #. When does a software go from Alpha, to Beta, to.. Stable? Does alpha mean not everything works and it's not meant for the public (like a game with enemies that don't shoot back)? Beta means might be abnormally buggy but usable? Stable when most of the bugs have been squashed? I'm just guessing here. Is there a convention for version numbers or is it just whatever I feel like as long as a new version is > than the previous?

For me it depends on my agenda for the program/script and its functions. List everything you want it to have for a certain "milestone" (version) and see how close you are to reaching your goal. I don't know of any standards for version numbers, but i do know that some people use, i think, odd numbers for unstable and even numbers for stable, and that they define "minor" and "major" changes by the place of the decimal. For example, from 2.6 to 2.7 would be a major update, and from 2.5.3 to 2.5.4 would be minor. Bugs may still be present even within programs that are marked stable, but that during the QA test everything worked like they were supposed to.I've recently stopped marking my programs with version numbers and mostly just rely on its revision number marked by the version (revision) control system, like subversion. It gets tiresome updating the version number in your program/script. It is so much easier to just mark, for example, an archive with the revision number and just hand over the source code.

I see, thanks for the reply. I don't know much about subversion.