RELEASES.md

Releases and versioning

This document describes the current release and versioning strategy. This strategy is likely to change as Rerun matures.

See also

• ARCHITECTURE.md
• BUILD.md
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• CODE_STYLE.md
• CONTRIBUTING.md

Release Cadence

New Rerun versions are released every two weeks. Sometimes we do out-of-schedule patch releases.

Library versioning and release cadence

Each release include new versions of:

• The Python SDK
• The Rust SDK
• All rust crates

We use semantic versioning. All versions are increased in lockstep, with a minor version bump each time (0.1.0, 0.2.0, 0.3.0, …).

This means we might add breaking changes in each new release.

In rare cases we will do patch releases, e.g. 0.3.1, when there is a critical bug fix. These patch releases will not contain any breaking changes.

We sometimes do pre-releases. Then we use the versioning 0.2.0-alpha.0 etc.

Data and communication versioning

We have not yet committed to any backwards or forwards compatibility.

We tag all data files (.rrd files) and communication protocols with the rerun version number. If there is a version mismatch, a warning is logged, but an attempt is still made to load the older or newer data.

Releases

Release builds of the Python Wheels are triggered by pushing a release tag to GitHub in the form v0.2.0. If we are doing a patch release, we do a branch off of the latest release tag (e.g. v0.3.0) and cherry-pick any fixes we want into that branch.

Release process

1. Check the root Cargo.toml to see what version we are currently on.

2. Create a release branch.

   The name should be:

   • release-0.x.y for final releases.
   • release-0.x.y-alpha.N where N is incremented from the previous alpha, or defaulted to 1 if no previous alpha exists.

3. If this is a patch release, cherry-pick commits for inclusion in the release into the branch.

4. Update CHANGELOG.md.

   It should include:

   • A one-line summary of the release
   • A multi-line summary of the release
   • A gif showing a major new feature
   • Run git tag -d latest && git fetch --tags ; pip install GitPython && scripts/generate_changelog.py
   • Edit PR descriptions/labels to improve the generated changelog
   • Copy-paste the results into CHANGELOG.md.
   • Editorialize the changelog if necessary
   • Make sure the changelog includes instructions for handling any breaking changes

   Once you're done, commit and push the changelog onto the release branch.

5. Run the release workflow.

   In the UI:

   • Set Use workflow from to the release branch you created in step (2).
   • Then choose one of the following values in the dropdown:

     • alpha if the branch name is release-x.y.z-alpha.N. This will create a one-off alpha release.

     • rc if the branch name is release-x.y.z. This will create a pull request for the release, and publish a release candidate.

   

6. Wait for the workflow to finish

   The PR description will contain next steps.