PSA: 3.2 branch renamed to 3.x, Godot 3.2.4 is now 3.3

[akien-mga]

Update: Blog announcement: https://godotengine.org/article/versioning-change-godot-3x

We decided to rename the upcoming Godot 3.2.4 release to 3.3 to better communicate that it's a feature-packed release. It still aims to be fully compatible with 3.2.x projects (as one would expect of 3.2.4), but there's enough new stuff that it's worth bumping the minor version and creating a dedicated maintenance branch for that release (with 3.3.x bugfix releases).

Git branches

Following this, we're changing our branching strategy for Godot 3 to be as follows:

• 3.x branch: Development branch for the next 3.x minor release, i.e. current 3.3. Once 3.3 is released, it will be the development branch for 3.4. (Basically like what master was before 3.2, and still is with 4.x.)
  • We will aim for a relatively fast development cycle for future 3.x minor releases. How fast depends on the features we plan to ship and how much work is needed to make them production ready, but we can aim for ~3 months or so.
• The 3.3 branch will be created from 3.x once 3.3-stable is released, and will be used strictly for bugfixes and low-risk UX enhancements. It will not get major new features, but on the other hand we will be able to release 3.3.x bugfix releases from it as fast as needed.
• The 3.2 branch is now read-only and will not be further developed, as it's effectively been renamed to 3.x (it should even have disappeared but GitHub's branch rename function seems to have failed...). All users of Godot 3.2.3 should upgrade to 3.3 once it's released, it's designed to be as safe as 3.2.4 would have been.
  • If there's a need in the future we can consider whether we want to release a bugfix only 3.2.3.1 release for users who can't upgrade to 3.3 for one reason or another. But the scope of such release would thus be only on security and platform compatibility fixes, and not the other many bugfixes which have been merged for 3.2.4 - now 3.3.

Future releases

Godot 3.3 will soon be released as it's the same as what was formerly known as 3.2.4, and is at Release Candidate stage.

Once released, we'll start work on 3.4 with some other features which have been proposed for the 3.2 branch until now.

We might then keep going with further 3.5+ releases, but the Godot 3 versions will eventually be superseded by Godot 4.x once it's released.