Today we want to share our new release schedule for libGDX with you. As announced in our last Status Report, we are very much committed to increasing the frequency of releases and thus a shortened release cycle is an essential part of our plans.
In the future, we want to release libGDX versions monthly. This (considerably) shorter release cycle allows us to separate breaking and non-breaking changes more clearly, provides more stability and reliability for you, the developers, as well as enables you to start integrating our improvements and new features much quicker into your applications. (Edit: Since 2020, we have realised that monthly releases might have been too ambitious. At the moment, we are trying to establish a quarterly release schedule.) Going forward, we want to use a kind of semantic versioning for our releases, where the priority is to avoid breaking changes between major releases. We also aim to keep backwards compatibility as much as possible, unless doing so would be a detriment to the project. To ensure that this shorter release cycle doesn’t compromise the quality of our releases, there will be a code freeze period, where no (controversial) changes to critical code will be merged. This allows us and you enough time to sufficiently test the snapshots.
We won’t be able to start implementing our schedule right off the bat, so our next release will be rolled out at the end of October followed by a release around the end of the year.
In the meantime, we are still hard at work processing all the issues and pull request that have accumulated over the years. In the last month we were able to merge 46 PRs and close 102 issues. Moreover, we’re fleshing out our concrete plans for the next releases and will share a broad roadmap of everything currently planned with you in our next Status Report.
