When I created compass I imagined a particular set of features Compass would have when it was done with the initial build out. I assigned that release a number of 1.0 and expected it would only take a few releases to get there.
But then there was users and their needs and the features they wanted. And so there have been 77 releases at the time that I'm writing this post. And you know what? I don't know when, or if, compass will ever achieve the mythical feature set I imagined.
Furthermore, it's been way too long since the last stable release. There was a hiatus, and then there was a mountain of bugs and feature requests that built up that I desperately wanted to get into the next release. And instead of just releasing incrementally better software every few weeks, I've been making a bigger and bigger release that is harder and harder to release.
And so I've fallen into the trap that so many software developers fall into. I'm working hard every day and I'm not shipping because it's not done. But we all know, software is never done (unless you are Donald Knuth).
And so I've decided to make a few changes. Sass 3.3 is ready for release and I want to get it out. Compass has to be released with it and there's no way I will get everything bug fix and new feature I need to get done. But what Compass development has right right now, is really a huge improvement. It's time to ship, even though it's not done and get this train moving. So here's what I'm doing to address these issues:
The next release will be version 1.0.0. This number doesn't mean anything. It's just an acknowledgement that compass is a mature project that has tens of thousands of users and that it is not in any way "not done".
Semantic versioning is a standard versioning scheme with standard expectations about what a change to a version means. From the site:
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.
Compass releases will follow semantic versioning going forward.
The core stylesheets and configuration of Compass have been extracted to
their own gem named compass-core. This gem allows projects that don't
need Compass's command line tools, extension management, and compilation
services, to work very simply using pure sass for much of configurable
bits of compass. The compass core framework will have it's own version
and will be released on it's own release train. If you don't care about
this, don't worrry; gem install compass still works exactly like it
used to.
Once Compass 1.0.0 is released. There are a ton of bug fixes and new features we'll be releasing. Instead of waiting until there's a critical mass, we'll just release whenever new features land and ship non-critical bug fixes every two weeks.
If you are the owner of a compass extension that declares a version dependency on compass, you need to update your gemspec to allow compass 1.0.0. Hit me up on twitter if you're not sure how to do this.
There's a 1.0.0 preview release available right now (1.0.0.alpha.13)
gem install compass --pre to get it.
If you find a bug, please make sure to mention 1.0 in the description.