On tests-passed, starting with 3.2.0.beta1-dev, Discourse core version numbers will include a -dev suffix to indicate that they’re not the final ‘release’ versions of a beta. This suffix doesn’t appear in the UI, so this is a technicality which will have no impact on the vast majority of people.
For the technical details, see below:
In the beta series for Discourse 3.1 and below, our versioning strategy was to ‘release’ a beta, and then leave the version number in tests-passed exactly the same until the next beta release. This came with a few problems
-
When trying to specify a version, a version like
3.1.0.beta2could refer to hundreds of possible points in time. This is particularly problematic when trying to precisely define compatibility via .discourse-compatibility files -
After a major version, we had to immediately ‘release’ beta1 of the next version in order to continue development on tests-passed. This is why we had redundant beta1 releases
To improve the situation, we will now be appending -dev to the version number during development of a beta release. So for example, we’re starting the 3.2 development cycle with 3.2.0.beta1-dev. When that’s ready to be released, it will be stamped as 3.2.0.beta1, and then we’ll followup immediately with another commit to start development of 3.2.0.beta2-dev.
Going forward, we intend ‘major releases’ to look something like this:
%%{init: { 'logLevel': 'debug', 'gitGraph': {'showBranches': true, 'showCommitLabel':true,'mainBranchOrder': 2}} }%%
gitGraph
branch stable order: 1
commit tag: "v3.1.8"
checkout main
commit id: "bump to v3.2.0.beta17" tag: "v3.2.0.beta17" type: HIGHLIGHT
commit id: "bump to v3.2.0.beta18-dev"
commit
commit id: "bump to v3.2.0.beta18" tag: "v3.2.0.beta18" type: HIGHLIGHT
checkout stable
merge main id: "merge"
commit id: "bump to v3.2.0" type: HIGHLIGHT tag: "v3.2.0"
checkout main
commit id: "bump to v3.3.0.beta1-dev"
‘minor releases’ will look something like
%%{init: { 'logLevel': 'debug', 'gitGraph': {'showBranches': true, 'showCommitLabel':true,'mainBranchOrder': 2}} }%%
gitGraph
branch stable order: 1
commit tag: "v3.1.1"
checkout main
commit id: "bump to v3.2.0.beta2-dev"
commit id: "... development of beta2 ..."
commit id: "bump to v3.2.0.beta2" tag: "v3.2.0.beta2" type: HIGHLIGHT
checkout stable
commit id: "backports"
commit id: "bump to v3.1.2" type: HIGHLIGHT tag: "v3.1.2"
checkout main
commit id: "bump to v3.2.0.beta3-dev"
(main and tests-passed can be considered equivalent in these diagrams)
These processes have been codified into some rake tasks which can be found in version_bump.rake.