The general philosophy behind Besu release numbering is as follows.
We bump the milestone when a release is big enough (such as full Mainnet compliance).
We do a quarterly release where we upgrade all dependencies with a RC release.
Feature development is done on the main (master) branch in GitHub. Significant features should include a feature flag so that the feature can be disabled by default.
We don’t do feature branches.
We do patch releases on a fortnightly cadence to allow access to bug fixes without delay.
As for numbering itself, the following approach is used:
- "Major Version" means a version of the Software identified by a change in the digit to the left of the left-most decimal point (X.x.x).
- "Minor Version" means a version of the Software identified by a change in the middle number in between the two decimal points (x.X.x).
- "Maintenance Version" means a version of the Software identified by a change in the digit to the right of the rightmost decimal point (x.x.X).
- We are not using semantic versioning.