Updates to Versioning and Release Cycle Documents

[Katie Frey]

Hello all,

While preparing the UAT v.3.1.0 release, it became apparent that the existing versioning and release documentation did not fit the workflow for the UAT. Reflecting on the UAT releases in the three years since this guidance was originally written, we’ve produced updated documents that align better with the versioning and release cycle of the UAT.

The UAT will continue to use version numbers inspired by Semantic Versioning, but features such as tracking backwards compatibility and functionality that are of core importance to software packages do not apply to data products such as the UAT. As such, the guidelines for deciding what constitutes a major, minor, or patch release has been re-written to better reflect the actual process of releasing new versions of the UAT.

Likewise, the Release Cycle has spun off into its own document, and has been greatly expanded to include a schedule based on the real work of updating the UAT over the last few years. The hope is that this Release Cycle document can help inform authors and users of the UAT about the process of updating the UAT, while the Curator will be able to use it to help guide how suggestions are evaluated and to alert the community of upcoming changes in a timely manner.

We expect these Versioning and Release Cycle documents will be revisited and revised in the future as needed.

(cross posted to UAT News & Updates and UAT-Users GoogleGroup)

Best,

Katie

-- Katie E. Frey Assistant Head Librarian Curator of the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus John G. Wolbach Library Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian 60 Garden Street | MS 56 | Cambridge, MA 02138 email: kf...@cfa.harvard.edu   |   phone: 617-496-7579 http://library.cfa.harvard.edu/    |   http://astrothesaurus.org

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