The Go bindings follow the same release schedule as the main C library, with new releases of both usually being tagged at the same time.
Despite the release schedule being the same, the Go bindings do not follow the same versioning scheme as the main C library.
The Go bindings have adopted semantic versioning, which is both expected in the Go ecosystem and extremly important in order to work correctly within the Go module system.
When it's time to tag a new release, the logic described below is
followed: in this example, we will assume that the most recent
release of the Go bindings is v1.7005.0
(made along libvirt
7.5.0) and that libvirt 7.6.0 has just been tagged.
- if libvirt 7.6.0 introduces new APIs
- make sure the Go bindings implement them and tag the result as
v1.7006.0
- make sure the Go bindings implement them and tag the result as
- if libvirt 7.6.0 doesn't introduce new APIs
- if there have been other tweaks and changes to the Go bindings
since
v1.7005.0
- tag the current code as
v1.7005.1
- tag the current code as
- if the Go bindings are completely unchanged from
v1.7005.0
- do nothing
- if there have been other tweaks and changes to the Go bindings
since
This versioning scheme has the following desirable properties:
- it complies with the semantic versioning specification;
- it contains an encoded version of the libvirt API it implements, making it easy to tell at a glance whether or not the libvirt functionality you're interested in will be available to your Go application;
- it removes the need for users to update their import paths once per year even though the Go bindings have retained complete backwards compatibility;
- it avoids the situation where a new version of the Go bindings is tagged even though it contains no actual changes, as well as the opposite scenario where fixes made to the Go bindings cannot make it into a release until the C library introduces a new API.