Re: [Taler] Taler releases

[Christian Grothoff]

Dear Slack Coder,

First of all, thanks for alerting me that my FTP upload didn't work, I 
used a new script to publish the source TGZ and it seems to have 
(silently) failed on me. I'll need to investigate this, I thought I did 
publish some 0.11 release TGZ on ftp.gnu.org, but clearly I failed :-(.

Anyway, aside from that, the main things to know:

x.y.z

if x=0: pre-production development releases, maybe suitable for 
regional- or event currencies, but probably not for regulatory-compliant 
production systems. No warranties, check the bug tracker, etc. :-).

y: feature-based milestone, when all components have reached the 
milestone, we'll announce the release.

z: minor release per component, used to make minor releases with 
bugfixes or new features after a release, and also to make pre-releases 
for testing before the release announcement.

None of these are at all indicative of *protocol* compatibility: for 
that we have the protocol versioning MAJOR:MINOR:AGE with colons (see 
https://tutorials.taler.net/merchant/versioning).  In general, we 
introduce new features but will remain compatible with *several* 
protocol versions back and only drop compatibility when we're pretty 
sure that nobody we're aware of is still using ancient code. So no 
_need_ to check for versions in general. Exceptions may apply, 
especially for x=0 and isolated features, but we try very, very hard to 
avoid those already.

So basically, if you want the features of release y, use all components 
of y otherwise you might not get the features. Of an individual 
component we may at any time make improvements by bumping z. Don't worry 
at all about having z differ between components, it is *normal*.

Once x>0, we'll kind-of use SEMVER where x indicates major new 
developments and y indicates fully compatible changes and z minor 
patches, but *still* we cannot ever expect everyone to update to a new 
version at the same time, so we *must* always be compatible to x +/- 1 
version *at least*. For details, the only way to know is to check the 
protocol versioning (/config endpoint) for the respective component via 
MAJOR:MINOR:AGE as explained in the video-tutorial linked above.

I hope this helps!

Happy hacking!

Christian


On 5/28/24 19:58, Slack Coder wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> How should third parties know when to bump Taler releases?  The current 
> situation is a little confusing.  The git repository has the v0.11 
> releases on it -and- debian packages on a new install are bumped to 
> v0.11.  The source tarballs are not available on ftpmirror.gnu.org, and 
> the Taler wallet on f-droid is on v0.10.
>
> Somewhat related, will Taler wallets be forward/backward compatible to 
> some degree between releases?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Slack Coder