Camunda versioning and bugfixes

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Hi,

I was wondering why Camunda chooses not to implement bugfixes in the current stable version as minor releases but instead forces us to migrate to a newer alpha version. A couple of days ago version 7.5.0 came out. Congratulations by the way! At the time of the announcement it was clear already some regression had occurred so it came with the following disclaimer;

Known Issues
Camunda 7.5.0 has a regression with the REST API resource for message correlation (see ticket CAM-6139). We will release Camunda 7.6.0-alpha1 with a bug fix in the near future.

And also as time evolves more bugs will be discovered. When a company or end user chooses to go with some version of a product he must have the possibility to stay with that specific major version while keeping the possibility of having future bug fixes (ideally…).

To get technical I know you guys are using git so you also know a future branch can be merged with a new 7.6-alpha branch as well as a 7.5.1 branch without any major efforts. This 7.5.1 version can then be promoted on the Camunda homepage as the newest stable which is nice.

Please do not consider this a rant, I only want to have an open discussion about the versioning of Camunda or be enlightened on why versioning is as it is now.

Keep up the good work!

Kind regards,
Nico Van Belle

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Hi Nico,

That is a valid concern. The reason for this is that we offer pure patch releases (e.g. 7.5.1) exclusively to enterprise edition customers (see this information on our commercial offering: https://camunda.com/bpm/enterprise/#patch). Since I am not involved in sales, I am not able to comment on how much this is a selling point of our product on top of the other services, but I guess it is substantial.

Regarding alpha releases, I can say that we test alpha releases with the same infrastructure and pretty much the same effort that we test minor releases. Of course it may happen that an alpha contains new, unfinished features, so it is certainly not the same thing as a patch release.

Regarding, 7.6.0-alpha1, we plan to release it at the end of next week. If you check the 7.6.0 JIRA filter, you find that it contains almost no new features yet so I expect this to technically become a patch release. The remaining issue with 7.6.0-alpha1 is probably the naming.

Cheers,
Thorben

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