Introduction

In the past ReDBox has focused on a yearly major release cycle with only very occasional hotfix releases as required through the year. This has worked well for institutions as the process of upgrading has required significant resources but this has meant that it's been difficult to track and communicate the development effort that has been undertaken towards that release. By producing a number of feature releases across the year culminating in a final major release, we believe that there will be able to achieve "the best of both worlds".

Versioning Scheme

The versioning scheme will be the following:

1.major.feature[.revision]

Where:

major is a major release of a set of features, typically we will aim for one release a year.

feature is a feature release containing one large feature or a smaller set of features. These releases might occur every few months

revision is for hotfix releases to rectify any major bugs found in an already released version of the application

Version 2 of ReDBox is planned to be a completely reworked product and may use a more standard semantic versioning scheme.

Upgrading and Support

There will be no obligation to upgrade to every feature release of the application as they are made available but it does make it possible to access some of the new features earlier if they are highly desirable (for example an upgrade to the latest version of RIF-CS). With the changes made to institutional builds in the 1.8 release, we expect the upgrade process between both feature and major releases to be much more straightforward and will have the opportunity to test this process out through the year.