Maintenance

During the lifetime of a minor version, new releases (patch versions) are published on a monthly basis. This document describes the boundaries of acceptable changes.

Bug fixes are accepted under the following conditions:

The change does not break valid unit tests;
New unit tests cover the bug fix;
The current buggy behavior is not widely used as a “feature”.

Note

When documentation (or PHPDoc) is not in sync with the code, code behavior should always be considered as being the correct one.

Besides bug fixes, other minor changes can be accepted in a patch version:

Performance improvement: Performance improvement should only be accepted if the changes are local (located in one class) and only for algorithmic issues (any such patches must come with numbers that show a significant improvement on real-world code);
Newer versions of PHP: Fixes that add support for newer versions of PHP are acceptable if they don’t break the unit test suite;
Newer versions of popular OSes: Fixes that add support for newer versions of popular OSes (Linux, MacOS and Windows) are acceptable if they don’t break the unit test suite;
Translations: Translation updates and additions are accepted;
External data: Updates for external data included in Symfony can be updated (like ICU for instance);
Version updates for Composer dependencies: Changing the minimal version of a dependency is possible, bumping to a major one or increasing PHP minimal version is not;
Coding standard and refactoring: Coding standard fixes or code refactoring are not recommended but can be accepted for consistency with the existing code base, if they are not too invasive, and if merging them on master would not lead to complex branch merging;
Tests: Tests that increase the code coverage can be added.

Anything not explicitly listed above should be done on the next minor or major version instead (aka the master branch). For instance, the following changes are never accepted in a patch version:

New features;
Backward compatibility breaks: Note that backward compatibility breaks can be done when fixing a security issue if it would not be possible to fix it otherwise;
Support for external platforms: Adding support for new platforms (like Google App Engine) cannot be done in patch versions;
Exception messages: Exception messages must not be changed as some automated systems might rely on them (even if this is not recommended);
Adding new Composer dependencies;
Support for newer major versions of Composer dependencies: Taking into account support for newer versions of an existing dependency is not acceptable.
Web design: Changing the web design of built-in pages like exceptions, the toolbar or the profiler is not allowed.

Note

This policy is designed to enable a continuous upgrade path that allows one to move forward with newest Symfony versions in the safest way. One should be able to move PHP versions, OS or Symfony versions almost independently. That’s the reason why supporting the latest PHP versions or OS features is considered as bug fixes.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.