Versioning policy

Versioning policy and branch workflow

Contributors are encouraged to understand our branch workflow described below, for choosing where to branch when making a change (and thus the merge base for a pull request).

Major and minor releases are cut from the master branch.
Each major and minor release has a long-lived maintenance branch, e.g., v0.3-branch. This is called a "release branch".
From the release branch the pre-release release candidates are tagged, e.g., v0.3.0-rc.1
From the release candidates the stable patch version releases are tagged, e.g.,v0.3.0.

A release branch should be substantially feature complete with respect to the intended release. Code that is committed to master may be merged or cherry-picked on to a release branch, but code that is directly committed to a release branch should be solely applicable to that release (and should not be committed back to master).

In general, unless you're committing code that only applies to a particular release stream (for example, temporary hot-fixes, back-ported security fixes, or image hashes), you should base changes from master and then merge or cherry-pick to the release branch.

Feast Component Matrix

The following table shows the status (stable, beta, or alpha) of Feast components.

Component status indicators for Feast:

Stable means that the component has reached a sufficient level of stability and adoption that the Feast community has deemed the component stable. Please see the stability criteria below.
Beta means that the component is working towards a version 1.0 release. Beta does not mean a component is unstable, it simply means the component has not met the full criteria of stability.
Alpha means that the component is in the early phases of development and/or integration into Feast.

Component	Status	Notes
Feast Python SDK	Stable
Feast Go Feature Server	Beta
Feast Java Feature Server	Alpha

Criteria for reaching stable status:

Contributors from at least two organizations
Complete end-to-end test suite
Scalability and load testing if applicable
Automated release process (docker images, PyPI packages, etc)
API reference documentation
No deprecative changes
Must include logging and monitoring

Criteria for reaching beta status

Contributors from at least two organizations
End-to-end test suite
API reference documentation
Deprecative changes must span multiple minor versions and allow for an upgrade path.

Levels of support <a id="levels-of-support"></a>

Feast components have various levels of support based on the component status.

Application status	Level of support
Stable	The Feast community offers best-effort support for stable applications. Stable components will be offered long term support
Beta	The Feast community offers best-effort support for beta applications. Beta applications will be supported for at least 2 more minor releases.
Alpha	The response differs per application in alpha status, depending on the size of the community for that application and the current level of active development of the application.

Support from the Feast community <a id="support-from-the-kubeflow-community"></a>

Feast has an active and helpful community of users and contributors.

The Feast community offers support on a best-effort basis for stable and beta applications. Best-effort support means that there’s no formal agreement or commitment to solve a problem but the community appreciates the importance of addressing the problem as soon as possible. The community commits to helping you diagnose and address the problem if all the following are true:

The cause falls within the technical framework that Feast controls. For example, the Feast community may not be able to help if the problem is caused by a specific network configuration within your organization.
Community members can reproduce the problem.
The reporter of the problem can help with further diagnosis and troubleshooting.

Please see the Community page for channels through which support can be requested.