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Release cycle

ASF uses common C# versioning with 4 numbers, written as A.B.C.D. Given version is always frozen, pointing to a fixed source code it was built from (bundled together with the release). We do not intend to remove any previously-published version, as long as our hosting provider (GitHub) remains fine with preserving them for indefinite future, therefore you can safely rollback to any of them without a need of making self-copies.

In general in terms of ASF versioning, we're doing our best to follow semver versioning of MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH on the 3 least significant numbers - B.C.D. Those three numbers are directly related to ASF's code. The most significant A number indicates changes with a scope that goes beyond ASF codebase itself, usually directly affecting the foundation of the program.

ASF as a project is aiming to have more or less one feature release per month, indicated by a bump of C number. In order to make such release possible, we have smaller pre-releases dedicated to advanced users, which serve as smaller milestones of changes that are released on as-needed basis when there will be enough of changes since the last pre-release to focus on. Eventually, when a final pre-release will be determined to be stable and mature enough with no known critical regressions that should be corrected compared to previous stable release, it'll be promoted to the new stable release, at the same time opening a new monthly cycle for the next one.

While we're doing our best to ensure that even our pre-releases are relatively stable, it should be noted that pre-releases should be carefully evaluated when running in any production environment. Pre-releases might have critical bugs and otherwise broken functionality, which is exactly why we're releasing them to begin with - so we can avoid all of that mess in our stable builds and offer reliable software. If you're unwilling to accept higher risk that comes from using potentially unstable software, please avoid using our pre-release builds and stick with our latest stable build instead, which is more appropriate for majority of users.

Depending on amount of changes in the cycle, usually there will be a single C version bump (from previous stable), and D bumps for every pre-release on as-needed basis. However, when introducing changes with far bigger scope, especially breaking changes, the cycle might start from (or switch in the middle) to B or even A bump - such switch indicates that current release cycle has a potential to be more unstable than usual, and should be tested carefully. Keep in mind that semver changes we're making relate only to previously released stable version, we do not track versioning across pre-releases in a cycle themselves, which means that version 1.0.1.2 might have a new feature that 1.0.1.1 didn't have, as long as the previously marked stable release is from 1.0.0.X family. Likewise, there could be major breaking changes even across two pre-releases from the same cycle, which is especially true when we're still deciding about the final shape of newly-introduced functionality or similar.

Version bump	Semver	Example of changes
A		Major .NET runtime changes, foundation changes, breaking changes that are beyond ASF's codebase, stuff that might eat your cat
B	Major	Minor .NET runtime changes, breaking changes in ASF codebase, major code edits that go beyond minor classification
C	Minor	New monthly cycles, usually introducing new functionalities, commands, configuration properties or other changes that do not break the existing setups
D	Patch	New pre-releases that are part of existing cycle (indicated by more significant number), critical bugfixes to existing stable releases that introduce no code changes beyond necessary

Please note that newly introduced features and changes may be undocumented (e.g. on the wiki) until some time later, as documentation is usually written once final code of given feature is ready (to save us time rewriting documentation each time we decide to modify the feature we're currently working on). Due to the fact that pre-releases may contain work-in-progress code that doesn't have a final form yet, documentation may arrive at later stage of the development. Same thing applies to general changelog that may be unavailable for given pre-release until some time later. Therefore if you decide to use pre-releases then be prepared for looking inside ASF commits from time to time. Of course, lack of documentation applies only to pre-releases - each stable version must always have a complete changelog and documentation on the wiki the moment it's being released.

The precise changelog that compares one version to another is always available on GitHub - through commits and code changes. In release we tend to document only changes we consider important between last stable and current release. Such brief changelog is never a complete one, so if you'd like to see every change that happened between one version and another (such as our dependencies upgrades) - please use GitHub comparison for that.

ASF project is powered by our continuous integration process. Every build is supposed to be reproducible, therefore it should not be a problem to grab source (included in the release) of given version and compile yourself receiving the same result as the one available through our precompiled binaries. We typically avoid compiling releases ourselves, as long as the systems are operative, the released binaries come directly from our CI process.