Hi All, I'd like to bring a discussion about the release versioning of Dubbo.
The problem is the that the currently release versioning won't lead to a stable state eventually. In each 2.7.x release, a lot of new features were added, as well as bugfix, however, newly added features will introduce additional bugs, which make 2.7.x not to be in a stable state. The solution will be cut a branch that only contains bugfix, and do not adding any new features. This will cause us to consider what versioning scheme should be considered for Dubbo. Option 1: use 4 digit versioning. For example, cut a branch called 2.7.2.x, that only contains bugfix, next version should be 2.7.2.1, and 2.7.2.2, and so on. New features are added to 2.7.3 or 2.7.4, and so on. Option 2: follow semantic versioning For example, 2.7.x only contains bugfix, next bugfix version should be 2.7.3, 2.7.4, and so on, on some day the branch should be stable and marked production ready. New features are added to 2.8.x, to avoid possible conflict with dubbox (they made serval releases to these versions), I suggest to skip 2.8.x and go to 2.9.x. Option 3: new features go to 3.x Same to option 2, 2.7.x only contains bugfix, new features still go to 3.x I am leaning towards option 2 because it follow the semantic versioning most. I also did an investigation of other famous project like spring-boot, kubernates, and grpc, they all follow semantic versioning. Regarding version ended with RC or Milestone, based on my investigation above, in most cases, they only add RC or Milestone suffix when there is at least a minor version upgrade (which means new features are added). For example, in spring-boot, the version is: - 2.0.8.RELEASE - 2.0.9.RELEASE - 2.1.0.M1 - 2.1.0.M2 - ... - 2.1.0.RC1 - 2.1.0.RELEASE - 2.1.1.RELEASE Normally there won't be a RC or Milestone for a bugfix release. Kubernetes has its own release versioning specification as well [2]. So I suggest for newly added feature, if we think it is unstable, we should release serveral RC or milestone first. e.g. in the 2.9.x branch, do some relasese called 2.9.x-M1 or 2.9.x-RC1. What do you think? [1] https://semver.org/ [2] https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contributors/design-proposals/release/versioning.md#kubernetes-release-versioning -- Best Regards！ Huxing
