Release Management

Econ-ARK releases updates biweekly, if changes have been made in the preceding two weeks. Our releases are hosted on PyPI, however we do not update the 'default' release (that is, the release pip installs by default, indicated by the 'stable' tag) nearly so often. Instead, we aim to update the stable/default release every 3-6 months, depending on demand for new features and our availability to thoroughly test the new stable/default release for bugs and breaking changes.

Version Numbering

Econ-ARK uses semantic versioning to number our releases. Semantic versioning uses the format Major.Minor.Patch. The current release of HARK is 0.9.1, with the 0 in the "Major" position, indicating that the project as a whole is in its early stages and thus we have a higher likelihood of pushing both intentional and unintentional breaking changes.

New features and other significant changes will lead us to increment in the "Minor" position, while patches and very minor changes will lead to increments of the "Patch" position.

Release Notes

All version releases, however small, will include release notes, with any known breaking changes indicated in those notes. In order for a pull request to be merged, it should include a summary line to go in the release notes. If the pull request introduces known breaking changes, the PR should also include a description of how to adapt your code to fix the breaking change, illustrated with an example.

All pull requests, immediately after merging, should be given the label "add to release notes". When a new release occurs, the summaries from the pull requests will be incorporated into the release notes and the label will be removed.

Odds and Ends

• All releases after 0.9.1 are tagged in the HARK Github repository using the format release-$versionNumber