On 17 Sep 2020 the Hyperledger TSC voted to Allow projects to use CalVer or SemVer.
General background on Calendar Versioning (CalVer) - https://calver.org/
CalVer taxonomy: YY.M.patch
- YY: Year (20, 21, 22, etc.)
- M: Month (1, 2, 3, ..., 11, 12).
- Patch: Fortnightly releases, or whenever sub-month releases happen.
- YY.M.patch: The year and month are from the current month.
Breaking Changes Policy
- No intentional backwards incompatible breaking changes should occur without 3 months of prior notice via the deprecation policy.
- Java Plugin APIs
- CLI flags and configuration files
- On-disk storage compatibility
- JSON-RPC APIs
- Patches may introduce forwards compatible changes, such as (but not limited to) new features, new fork or chain support, and new JSON-RPC apis.
- A notice for an intentional breaking change should be in the CHANGELOG.md file for at least 3 months.
- Examples of such changes:
- Changing the required JDK. (such as when we went form Java 17 to Java 21).
- Removing storage formats, or required migrations.
- Dropping obsolete CLI flags, such as the whitelist series flags (replaced by the allowlist series)
- This breaking change policy will not prohibit rapid release of security related updates.