SemanticVersioning

Semantic versioning is a set of rules to number releases in a meaningful and consistent manner. The idea is that a user can immediately see from the release number how severe changes are between releases.

Summary of rules

The semantic versioning page contains the rules that we follow. In brief:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
3. PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

MDAnalysis and Semantic Versioning

A brief summary for what this means for MDAnalysis is given under Release Policy and Release Numbering.