Development snapshots

Rationale

An open source project may benefit from early, frequent releases of development snapshots, in addition to the slower cycle of stable releases. However, the purpose and the target public of stable releases versus development snapshots is totally different. Therefore, it is meaningful to use different sites to make them available.

The purpose of this web page is to make the MyHDL development snapshots available. The stable releases will remain on SourceForge.

What (not) to expect

Development snapshots are unstable or incomplete. Problems and inconsistencies should be anticipated. In particular:

documentation, implementation and tests may be incomplete, outdated or incorrect
experimental features may not be included in a stable release

That having said, there are also a number of guarantees :

all existing regression tests run without errors
the snapshot release number is used to tag the CVS tree and to set myhdl.__version__

In contrast to official releases, development snapshots will be removed some time after a better release is available.

When to use a snapshot

When you are new to MyHDL, you should start with the latest stable release.

On the other hand, experienced MyHDL users are encouraged to try out development snapshots and to provide feedback. It is a great way to help development.

Usually you will know when and why to use a snapshot based on support information. Typically such a snapshot will solve a blocking bug, add a crucial new feature, or you have agreed to test some new feature to provide feedback.

Version naming conventions

Each development snapshot is considered a step towards a subsequent stable release. It will be named by attaching a status indicator and a snapshot number to the release number. For example, 0.5dev2 would be the second development snapshot towards the 0.5 release.

A number of status indicators may be used, according to the following table, in order of increasing stability: