How is AdonisJS structured?
AdonisJS is a collection of several first party packages built around the core of the framework. Whenever, you hear us mentioning the AdonisJS version, just assume that we are talking about the version of the framework core.
Every other package like @adonisjs/lucid, or @adonisjs/mail have their own independent versions and they are free to have their own release cycle.
Goals
Following is the list of goals we want to achieve with our release process.
- Add new features in a way that doesn't break existing apps.
- Ship security and bug fixes every week and bump the patch version of the framework
- Make a minor release about every six weeks. This is the time when we ship new feature, without disturbing existing features or APIs.
- Plan breaking changes ahead of time and deprecate them before they get removed.
- Let every deprecated API live in the codebase until the next major release. This gives enough time to the teams to make changes to their code.
Shipping Breaking Changes
As per the semver, a package should only have a major release when there is a breaking change and vice-versa.
However, with AdonisJS, we follow a slightly different approach of not releasing breaking changes right away, but instead following the depreciation policy.
- Everytime there is a breaking change, we will first depereciate the old API and implement the breaking change behavior as a new API.
- Everyone using AdonisJS will receive depreciation warnings for the older API and they can apply fixes at their own convience.
- Once, we are confident about the stability of the newer API, we will rollout a major release just removing the depreciated code.
Shipping New Features
We follow a 6 weeks release cycle for shipping new features. If you are interested in using the unreleased and undocumented features, then you can install the @next version of the desired package from npm registry.