PLEP-0005 – PlasmaPy Versioning and Releases

PlasmaPy final releases will be of the form MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH where MAJOR, MINOR, and PATCH are non-negative integers that are always present. During the development phase (when MAJOR equals zero), the public application programming interface (API) should be considered unstable between minor releases. The first development release will be in early 2018, with subsequent development releases occurring every six months. Version 1.0.0 will be released after the API has stabilized and PlasmaPy is ready for production use. Starting with version 1.0.0, MAJOR will be incremented when there are changes that remove backwards compatibility, MINOR will be incremented when backwards compatible functionality is added, and PATCH will be incremented for bug fixes and other changes that do not affect the API. A major or minor release should occur no less frequently than every six months, with major or long term support releases happening every other year.