I noticed that since ray 2.9.3, ray has not made a patch release, and the version number increases pretty fast in a such short period. Why is ray releasing much more frequently now? Is ray moving away from semantic versioning?
I feel this can be confusing for users to choose which version they want, since the differences between versions seems minor. In the past, ray made minor version releases around every 1 month, which in my opinion a good pace.
Thank you for your questions. For more details on Ray’s weekly releases see [here](https://www.anyscale.com/blog/ray-spotlight-delivering-weekly-releases).
The semantics of Ray versions remain the same: minor version increments signify new features and enhancements, while patch version increments are reserved for catastrophic bug fixes only. The only change in this new system is the release cadence, not Ray’s versioning semantics.
Patch releases for Ray are still used solely for catastrophic issues, even with our new weekly release cadence—we simply haven’t needed one recently. Each new Ray release includes new features, enhancements, and non-urgent bug fixes, all detailed in the Ray release notes. You can be confident that every new Ray release is as stable as the previous version, having passed our rigorous quality assurance standards.
Furthermore, while the speed of release has increased we’ve (very consciously) maintained the same deprecation timelines and API stability definitions as before that was working well with the community.
It’s just now there will be more releases (so the community can get enhancements and bugs sooner).