Versioning

We generally follow . The general idea is

• “Major” version (leftmost): backwards incompatible, no guarantees exist about APIs between the versions
• “bug-fix” version (“patch” or the rightmost): Interchangeable. The higher the number, the more things are fixed (hopefully), but the programming interfaces are completely compatible and you should be able to just drop in a new jar and have it work.

One exception for right now, while we are still in major version 0, we are considering the APIs to be in beta and are conflating “major” and “minor” so a minor version increase could be backwards incompatible for as long as we are at major version 0. These will be communicated via email on the group.

Tagging strategy

Tags of the codebase are equivalent to release candidates. We tag the code every time we want to take it through our release process, which includes some QA cycles and deployments. So, it is not safe to assume that a tag is a stable release, it is a solidification of the code as it goes through our production QA cycle and deployment. Tags will never change, but we often go through a number of iterations of tags before actually getting a stable release onto production. So, it is recommended that if you are not aware of what is on a tag, to stick to the stable releases listed on the page.