Release Workflow

All new development work happens on the default develop branch. Periodically, we might create new releases from the develop branch based on needs.

Since ckb-vm is strongly tied to ckb, ckb-vm will pay special attention to ckb's release schedule: each CKB's hardfork version will be fixated on a ckb-vm minor version. For example, the CKB2023 hardfork uses ckb-vm 0.24.x series of releases. API stability is maintained here: when 0.24.0 is first release, the API set of ckb-vm for CKB2023 hardfork will also be fixed. Only hotfix patches will be backported to the 0.24.x release series. New features going into ckb-vm's develop branch might be released as ckb-vm 0.25.0, 0.26.0, etc. But they will not be included for CKB20232 hardfork release.

When the next hardfork for CKB happens, a new ckb-vm release version might be generated, for example, assuming CKB plans to do another hardfork for CKB2025, and it is decided on to use ckb-vm 0.28.0, it will then start a new series of release 0.28.x with hotfixes for CKB2025 hardfork release.