Releases and Versioning

Releasing and Versioning the BHoM

The BHoM is released as a complete package, with the individual BHoM libraries and its toolkits all versioned together. This is to ensure ease of tracking compatibility across the number of dependant repositories.

BHoM versions are therefore named using the following convention:

major.minor.α/β.increment

Major version

A major version denotes some fundamental change in the BHoM framework. Targeted approximately yearly.

Minor version

Minor versions denote the more frequently planned development cycles and the release of new features/issues, as per individual development road maps and SCRUM planning. Targeted every couple of months/quarterly.

Alpha releases

The live current state of all the master branches are compiled as an alpha release. This is automatically kept up to date for each successful merging of a PR or PR cluster. Each alpha release will therefore have a major and minor version number according to the current development cycle, followed by an alpha and an incremented release number for each occurrence,
i.e. major.minor.α.increment.

Beta releases

At the end of a successful development cycle a new beta version will be released
i.e. major.minor.β.0.

A new minor development cycle will therefore then start.

Hotfixes to beta releases are made only in exceptional circumstances.
That is if and only if a critical issue is found and it is deemed necessary to include in the previous minor version, in advance of the release of the current cycle. If this happens, the last digit of the beta release will be incremented, i.e. major.minor.β.1 etc.

Example development and release sequence

Example table of a sequence of releases over a number of development cycles:

2.1		2.2		2.3
2.1.α.0
2.1.α.1
2.1.α.2
2.1.α.3
...
2.1.β.0	≡	2.2.α.0
		2.2.α.1
		2.2.α.2
		...
		2.2.β.0	≡	2.3.α.0
		2.2.β.1		2.3.α.1
				2.3.α.2
				...

Bold denotes deployed release
Italic denotes hotfix