Notes about Prawn 1.0 roadmap

[practicingruby]

Hello!

Thanks for building an extension to Prawn. I'm filing this issue to let you know that we're currently working towards a stable 1.0 release of Prawn, and I want to invite you to be part of the discussion around that.

We will only have one more major release before 1.0 is shipped: it will be labeled 0.15 and it will be cut on 2014-02-16.

The functionality of the 0.15 release will be largely the same as what we ship in 1.0, so if you want to test your project against the newest Prawn code, that would be a good time to
do it. You can also get a head start by trying out what is on master now, and reporting any problems you encounter.

If your project is sufficiently up to date and is able to run on the latest Prawn code, the next step would be to take a look at our API compatibility plans, which are described in detail here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/prawn-ruby/dbTSnlDhED0

Here's the very quick summary:

• If your project is using stable APIs and ONLY stable APIs, it will be safe for you to lock your Prawn dependency to "~> 1.0".
• If your project is using stable and extension APIs, keep an eye out for deprecation warnings, and lock your gem to
  a range of known good minor Prawn versions. (i.e. ">= 1.0", "<=1.x"). We want to eventually apply semantic versioning to our extension API as well, but we're not there yet.
• The use of experimental APIs in your extensions is not recommended unless you consider your own code to be experimental as well. Instead, work with us to figure out what it would take to get these experimental APIs stabilized or extracted.

I know this is a little bit confusing, and my hope is that in the not too distant future we'll be able to cut a Prawn 2.0 release that has much better support for downstream dependencies.

Until that time, what we lack in stability we'll try to make up in support for your project. Use the Prawn mailing list to contact us about any concerns or breakage, help us work on API stabilization, and let us know when you need extension points to support your project.

Thanks!
-greg

[augnustin]

👍