Versioning for RStudio (preview releases?)

[ciil]

Hi there RStudio community,

repology(.org) is a project helping distributions and distribution package maintainers keep up with the versions of packages shipped with their respective Linux distributions, by comparing them to versions shipped in other distributions. Last year, you started releasing versions tagged in the 1.2 line as preview versions, which we then marked as "development" versions (https://github.com/repology/repology-rules/pull/94/commits/e3a79300360ee2b6e9f4e9f8c1c19b867ef70843) such that distributions packaging the official mainline releases don't get marked out of date because somebody already ships a preview release (for any reason).

Currently, as far as I can surmise from https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/preview/ you're tagging preview releases again, but just with the patch/build part of your semantic versioning somewhat higher than the current stable release. (1.2.1335 vs. 1.2.1522 at this time.)

Are there currently plans to again switch to e.g. 1.3 as a preview tree while continuing stable releases on the 1.2 branch? Or any other ways to tag releases that can be checked for automatically (like e.g. always including an "-alpha" suffix in the tag)?

And if not, would you consider doing so in the future, as that would definitely help the repology project and in turn distribution package maintainers?

Thanks in advance,
ciil

[kevinushey]

The current preview release is not intended to become a full new release -- it will become a patch release of the v1.2 series of RStudio. This is why we haven't bumped the version to v1.3. (Perhaps we should instead mark releases as e.g. 1.2.0 and 1.2.1, but we haven't done this historically)

We likely won't start advertising preview releases of v1.3 until near the end of the year.

[ciil]

I mean, it would definitely help with automatically drawing conclusions about releases as mentioned above. Repology has now just updated tagging releases in the 1.3 line as preview releases and we're now just hoping nobody accidentally packages a preview release.