A Primer on Smile CDR Versioning

Smile CDR uses Calendar Versioning for releases, along with a patch number indicator. This means that our releases will have the format YYYY.MM.RXX or YYYY.MM.PRE-XX, according to the following rules:

• YYYY – This indicates the year of the release, e.g. 2023.
• MM – This indicates the month of the release, e.g. 11.
• RXX – This indicates the micro version (or patch version) of a given Generally Available release. For each YYYY.MM, this starts at R01, and can increase to any amount.
• PRE-XX – This indicates the micro version of a given Prerelease. For each YYYY.MM, this starts at PRE-01, and can increase to any amount.

Types of Releases

Generally Available

A Generally Available Release will always have the format YYYY.MM.RXX. These releases undergo heavy automated testing, as well as manual verification from multiple teams. These releases are sanctioned for use in production environments, and are fully supported by our support team.

After a quarterly Generally Available release, it is inevitable that minor adjustments must be made. This could be for various reasons, including:

• A data integrity bug
• Severe dependency vulnerabilities
• Other extenuating circumstances

To deal with this, patches are provided to these Generally Available releases. These have the same YYYY.MM.RXX format as the initial Release, where XX will be continuously increasing as more releases are made, e.g. (R02, R03, R04, etc).

These releases contain hyper-targeted fixes to specific issues found with a given release, which are clearly labeled on the release page. Breaking API changes will never be introduced in a patch release, and it is always safe to upgrade from R01 to any subsequent RXX without fear of breaking changes.

When choosing a version of Smile CDR, you should always select the most recent patch version. For example, if you wanted to upgrade to 2024.02, and the available versions are:

• 2024.02.R01
• 2024.02.R02
• 2024.02.R03
• 2024.02.R04

You should always select 2024.02.R04.

Prereleases

While Generally Available releases are robustly tested and vetted, it is often useful to be able to test bleeding-edge features before they reach production-readiness. To this end, we support a set of releases called Prereleases. Prereleases will contain new features and fixes as they are added to the product by the development teams. These have the format YYYY.MM.PRE-XX.

Given that these releases are only tested via automated testing suite, these releases are not supported for production environments.

There are generally anywhere from 30 to 80 Prereleases between official quarterly Generally Available releases.

Release Cadence

Generally available releases occur quarterly for R01 versions, in February, May, August, and November. Generally speaking, they are released on the third thursday of the month. As an example, during the year 2024, the following Generally Available releases will be created:

• 2024.02.R01 – Released in February 2024
• 2024.05.R01 – Released in May 2024
• 2024.08.R01 – Released in August 2024
• 2024.11.R01 – Released in November 2024

Patches to Generally Available releases occur on no fixed schedule, and are created as critical issues are identified.

Prereleases are created on demand as new features are added to the product. This occurs overnight, and Prereleases are made available the following morning. There can be gaps between Prereleases if no new features have been added that particular day.

Example Releases

Here's an example of what a a time-series of releases from Smile CDR might look like.

Smile CDR Versioning

Versions and Upgrading

Smile CDR Versioning Upgrade Concepts Updating Smile CDR Software Upgrade Best Practices Database Migration Impact Vulnerability (CVE) Policy Migration Technical Details Appendix and FAQ

Upgrade Concepts