This page describes the versioning of The Forge. All versions of The Forge will follow the following format:
major.minor[.revision[.build]][type]
Where square brackets('[' and ']') represents an optional name.
A change in the major version represents a huge change in the goals/abilities of the program.
A change in the minor version represents a smaller change in the goals/abilities of the program.
A change in the revision represents a new public release version of the product, whether it was to add in new features (moving towards the goal of the version), or bug fixes.
The build number will reflect the SVN revision number. These values represent smaller changes in the code from small tweaks up to larger commits. This number will not be reset.
The type refers to the current development status of the application, which may be any of the following:
- dev - a development version, does not include all major features that are part of the goal of the version.
- a - an alpha version of the software, which does include all major features of the version, but is very likely to be extremely buggy.
- b - a beta version of the software, which should be fairly stable, but is still likely to contain smaller, hard to find bugs.
- rc - a release candidate of the software, which is a version that should be extremely stable, and if no further bugs are discovered, will turn into a stable version.
- s - a stable complete release of the version. A stable version of the release is likely to be the last in the series (major and minor numbers), as a stable version has implemented all of the features required for the series. Any further versions will be for the next series.
So a full version number could be something like this:
1.0.5.211rc
Which means that the version is 1.0 (it pertains to the feature set of version 1.0), public revision 5, SVN version 211, and it is a release candidate. Because of the optional components of the version, this could also be written as
1.0.5rc
1.0rc
or even
1.0.5.211
1.0.5
or 1.0
The first publicly released version of The Forge will be 1.0.0.?dev.
Feature Freezes
All versions of The Forge will have a specific set of features that it is to accomplish. Initially, these features are open, and may change over time. At a given point in time, the set of features will be decided and will not be able to change (a freeze). Any further features will be delayed until the next version series. A version of The Forge cannot be made an alpha version until the feature freeze, as features may still change.
