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RELEASE.md

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Release strategy

This project uses a semantic versioning release strategy. All major and minor features will be announced via our communication channels.

  • Major version bumps contain:
    • Breaking changes
    • Removal of features that were marked deprecated in a previous version and are expected to affect users
  • Minor version bumps contain:
    • New features with full support
    • Removal of minor features that were marked deprecated in a previous version and that are unlikely to affect users significantly
  • Patch version bumps may contain:
    • Bug fixes
    • Deprecations (no removal!)
    • Small quality-of-life improvements
    • Experimental/preview features
    • Performance improvements
    • Improvements to the code that do not affect the user

Some additional remarks:

  • Deprecated behavior shall be signalled via a deprecation warning.
  • The maintainers of the power-grid-model core package shall use the option to remove deprecated behavior in minor version bumps very sparingly.
  • In more feature-rich packages, like power-grid-model-ds and power-grid-model-io, removal may be slightly more common due to their nature and focus on usability.

This project uses a rolling release strategy on the main branch. A new push (merge) to the main branch will trigger GitHub Actions to automatically build and upload a new version to PyPI with a unique version number. In addition, we may manually create alpha (pre-)releases for testing purposes only via workflow dispatch.

All the bug fixes will be committed directly into the main branch and published in the latest release. No effort will be spent on backporting bug fixes to previous versions!

Actively supported Python versions

Core Python libraries in this project are released for at least the latest three stable Python versions. This means that for these Python versions, active support will be provided, including new versions of the library, bugfixes and security patches. Older Python versions may not be supported for security and maintainability reasons, both of this project itself, its direct and indirect dependencies and that of Python as a language.

An older Python version may be removed from the automatic release cycle if:

  • there are at least three newer stable Python versions (e.g. 3.x); and
  • at least three of those newer Python versions have been stable for at least three months; and
  • at least six months have passed since support for a previous stable Python version was dropped.

For the actively supported versions as of January 2026, the following release cycle is expected:

Python version Currently supported Scheduled/expected end of active support
Python 3.8 ❌ 10-January-2024 (dropped)
Python 3.9 ❌ 15-July-2024 (dropped)
Python 3.10 ❌ 27-January 2025 (dropped)
Python 3.11 ❌ 14-January 2026 (dropped)
Python 3.12 ✅ January 2027 (expected)
Python 3.13 ✅ January 2028 (expected)
Python 3.14 ✅ January 2029 (expected)

Starting with Python 3.10, the expected date of end of active support for a given Python version is approximately three years and three months after it comes out.