In this page you can find some examples of Git histories. To the sake of simplicity, these examples do not use a specific commit message convention but, instead, they just show the kind of commit that would be inferred by a convention. Semantic Versioning is the version scheme used.
Collapsed versioning is a strategy often used in pre-release branches that narrows the number of new versions generated by the commits in a branch so that they progressively end up to a single version which is the cumulative account of a whole range of commits. If you have already used pre-release branches you are probably confident with this kind of versioning but you probably wonder what's the algorithm behind.
When you use the version project property and it yields to the unspecified value although you expected it to be something else the reason may be:
Broadly speaking they are often used interchangeably but it depends on the perspective you're looking at it from. If you're asking is probably because in Nyx they are sometimes used as different entities.
The previous version is, broadly speaking, the version that came before the current one (current the one Nyx is in the process of releasing).
Nyx is named after 3908 Nyx, a notable Mars crossing asteroid, which in turn is named after the the Greek goddess of the night. We liked the name as it's three letters like the number of a semantic version number.
One of the very first steps when running a pipeline on a CI/CD platfom is checking out the Git repository and this is usually done by the platform without the user to define any specific configuration or workflow.