Spirit Design System Release Schedule
This is a living document outlining the plan for previous, current, and future major versions of the Spirit Design System.
| Release | Status | Initial release | Begin Active | Begin Maintenance | End of Life |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| main | unstable | unstable | unstable | unstable | unstable |
| v0 | End of Life | 2021-09-20 | 2021-09-20 | 2023-07-21 | 2024-06-10 |
| v1 🌟 Aura | End of Life | 2023-07-21 | 2023-07-21 | 2024-06-10 | 2024-10-17 |
| v2 🍃 Breeze | Maintenance | 2024-06-10 | 2024-06-10 | 2024-11-25 | -/- |
| v3 ✨ Charm | Active | 2024-10-17 | 2024-11-25 | -/- | -/- |
| v4 🌈 Divine | Unreleased | -/- | -/- | -/- | -/- |
Dates are subject to change
Next Major Release Plans
👉 See Releases in Jira Board and Quarterly Goals in the Notion.
Release Phases
Prerelease
The prerelease phase is intended to be the opportunity for early adopters, library authors, and other strategic ecosystem partners to begin to evaluate and integrate new changes into their codebases. For v3, this phase was more than a one month long and spanned five prerelease/alpha releases. We hope to extend this timeframe even further for our next major version.
Active
Consuming projects should always aim to follow the Active release.
A release in the Active phase receives biweekly minor releases containing new features and fixes. The work we deliver into main every day is considered unstable. Almost every two weeks we package up these changes into a new minor version that is published from main as the current Active version.
Maintenance
For a release in the Maintenance phase, patch releases are published containing security patches and critical bug fixes. When a version moves from Active to Maintenance, consuming projects should begin migrating to the new Active major version. During Maintenance we also consider adding non-critical bug fixes on an ad hoc basis, by request only. To request a fix be back-ported to a Maintenance release, please open an issue or let us know in support Slack channel.
Changes required for critical security and bug fixes may lead to semver-major changes landing within a release stream, such situations will be rare and will land as semver-minor. Although, those changes should have a revert option included.
Release Cycle Duration
There is no fixed release lifetime yet. However, based on our experience to date, we estimate the length of the active phase to be between six months and a year. We anticipate that this life phase will be extended.
Release Support Policy
We provide an active support for the current Active release and previous Maintenance release.
To get support for a specific version, please refer to the support Slack channel.
Release Names
To get more information about the release names, please refer to the Release Names Decision.
Assets Managed Under This Release Schedule
This plan covers the design and development assets under maintenance of the Spirit Design System core team. This includes the @lmc-eu/spirit-web, @lmc-eu/spirit-web-react and @lmc-eu/spirit-design-tokens packages, as well as all other packages within the spirit monorepo.
This plan also includes all design guidance and design kit assets (figma, etc.) present in the spirit-docs-website and spirit-ui-kit repositories.
Acknowledgements
This document was heavily inspired by the work of the NodeJS Release Working Group and Carbon Design System Release Schedule.