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qiskit/DEVELOPMENT_CYCLE.md

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DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

Our development cycle is straightforward, we define a roadmap with milestones for releases, and features that we want to include in these releases. The roadmap is not public at the moment, but it’s a committed project in our community and we are working to make parts of it public in a way that can be beneficial for everyone. Whenever a new release is close to be launched, we'll announce it and detail what has changed since the latest version. The channels we'll use to announce new releases are still being discussed, but for now you can follow us on Twitter!

BRANCH MODEL

There are two main branches in the repository:

  • master

    • This is the development branch.
    • Next release is going to be developed here. For example, if the current latest release version is r1.0.3, the master branch version will point to r1.1.0 (or r2.0.0).
    • You should expect this branch to be updated very frequently.
    • Even though we are always doing our best to not push code that breaks things, is more likely to eventually push code that breaks something... we will fix it ASAP, promise :).
    • This should not be considered as an stable branch to use in production environments.
    • The API of the SDK could change without prior notice.

  • stable

    • This is our stable release branch.
    • It's always synchronized with the latest distributed package, as for now, the package you can download from pip.
    • The code in this branch is well tested and should be free of errors (unfortunately sometimes it's not).
    • This is an stable branch (as the name suggest), meaning that you can expect an stable software ready for production environments.
    • All the tags from the release versions are created from this branch

RELEASE CYCLE

From time to time, we will release brand new versions of the QISKit SDK. These are well-tested versions of the software. When the time for a new release has come, we will:

  1. Merge the master branch with the stable branch.
  2. Create a new tag with the version number in the stable branch.
  3. Crate and distribute the pip package.
  4. Change the master version to the next release version.
  5. Announce the new version to the world!

The stable branch should only receive changes in the form of bug fixes, so the third version number (the maintenance number: ..) will increase on every new change.

WHAT VERSION SHOULD I USE: DEVELOPMENT OR STABLE?

It depends on your needs as a user. If you want to use QISKit for building Apps which goal is to run Quantum programs, we encourage you to use the latest released version, installing it via Pip.

$ pip install qiskit

If you found out that the release version doesn't fit your needs, and you are thinking about extending the functionality of the SDK, you are more likely to use the master branch and thinking seriously about contributing with us :)