On Thu, 3 Sep 2026 at 19:34, Korbinian Bachl <[email protected]> wrote:
> A new major version every 3 months? Thats twice the speed of java itself... > Wouldn't be 1 major version every year be enough? I think we’re over-indexing a bit on the word “major” here. The intention is not to make a Java-8-to-Java-17-sized change every 3 months. In practice these releases will probably look much more like the minor releases we do today, except that we don’t make the promise that there cannot be a small API break. That distinction is important. Our current semver rules can make relatively small changes unnecessarily difficult. Upgrading a dependency such as Jackson can require API changes. The restructuring of the IAuthorization interfaces is another example. These are not necessarily disruptive changes for most users, but semver still tells us they need to wait for the next major. The goal is not to use every release as an opportunity to break APIs. API breaks still have a cost, and if we can deprecate first or keep old and new APIs alongside each other for a while, we should. But when a change does require a small break, we should be able to make that change without putting it in a drawer for the next several years. So I would almost describe these as minor releases with the option to break compatibility when there is a good reason to do so. The other important part is that these releases are time based, not feature based. Every 3 months we release what is ready. If something isn’t ready, it moves to the next release. There is no need to fill a release with enough features to somehow justify incrementing the major version. That also means new work reaches users much faster. Today something can be completed on master and then spend an indefinite amount of time somewhere between “done” and “available to users”. With a fixed cadence, the maximum wait is predictable. For users who don’t want that cadence, the LTS releases provide the slower track. They can move from 10 to 14 and later to 18, while users who want new functionality sooner can follow the quarterly releases. So I don’t think the useful comparison is really “twice the speed of Java”. The version number makes it look more dramatic than the intended development model actually is. Martijn
