We do not have consistent release numbering across OE components. This tracker is for discussing and fixing that in 2.1 release. Secondly there is codename which is used for branching the releases but there is no obvious relation between release numbers and the branch name. This could be consolidated to have consistent naming across all release components. It would only make sense if we were to release the components independently with there own life cycle but there seems to be not the case.
it would be nice that yocto project reference distro also used same release naming convention as rest of components and drop any codenames in use. The distro should be renamed to reflect it being a reference distro, its not clear to user the obvious relation between poky and yocto project and reference distro. The heterogenous naming just makes it worse.
Having given this a lot of thought, I believe the branch codenames are the only real way to make the OE ecosystem work. This is because lots of different pieces have versions and we need something different to all things to match clearly. I'm therefore not planning to change the use of codenames. We are slowly removing confusing numbers like the poky version numbers where we can.