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Using CalVer for Besu Releases

Using CalVer for Besu Releases

Owned by Danno Ferrin

On 17 Sep 2020 the Hyperledger TSC voted to Allow projects to use CalVer or SemVer.  

General background on Calendar Versioning (CalVer) - https://calver.org/

CalVer taxonomy: YY.M.patch

  • YY: Year (20, 21, 22, etc.)
  • M: Month (1, 2, 3, ..., 11, 12). 
  • Patch: Fortnightly releases, or whenever sub-month releases happen.
  • YY.M.patch: The year and month are from the current month.

Breaking Changes Policy

  • No intentional backwards incompatible breaking changes should occur without 3 months of prior notice via the deprecation policy.
    • Java Plugin APIs
    • CLI flags and configuration files
    • On-disk storage compatibility
    • JSON-RPC APIs
  • Patches may introduce forwards compatible changes, such as (but not limited to) new features, new fork or chain support, and new JSON-RPC apis.
  • A notice for an intentional breaking change should be in the CHANGELOG.md file for at least 3 months. 
  • Examples of such changes:
    • Changing the required JDK.  (such as when we went form Java 17 to Java 21).
    • Removing storage formats, or required migrations.
    • Dropping obsolete CLI flags, such as the whitelist series flags (replaced by the allowlist series)
  • This breaking change policy will not prohibit rapid release of security related updates.

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