Development and stability

Versions of wulfric are labeled in a standard way as major.minor.patch. For example, version 0.4.0 is decoded as 0 major version, 4 minor version and 0 patch version.

The development of wulfric proceeds in two stages, that are reflected in the versions of the package. The principles listed here were formulated with the release 0.5.0.

Beta stage (0.*.*)

Unstable stage of development. Change of the minor version does not guarantee backward compatibility and may introduce changes of interface, may introduce changes of the public data-structure.

This stage allows the code to mature and reflect the best approaches for the problems that it is aimed for.

No timeline is set for the Beta stage.

It is recommended to fix the minor version at this stage (i.e. use wulfric==0.5.* to fix 5th minor version).

Stable stage (>=1.*.*)

When the code is mature enough, the first stable version will be published. Starting from the major version greater than 1 the code is considered to be stable. Minor versions might introduce new functionalities, but they would not break the old ones, neither compromise backward-compatibility.

Obsolete functions either kept or supported for at least two consecutive minor version changes (but no less than for two years) with DeprecationWarning before removal.

Change of the major version is not expected. However, new major release is not forbidden if the changes are breaking the principles of a minor release and are inevitable.