FreeCAD News

FreeCAD is switch­ing to the CalVer scheme for ver­sion­ing releas­es and a new devel­op­ment cycle that intro­duces time-based releas­es. Here is a quick explain­er on why the team is doing that and how this will affect users.

Why the switch?

There are mul­ti­ple issues with the cur­rent devel­op­ment cycle, such as an unpre­dictable, irreg­u­lar release sched­ule, as well as major updates being too far apart, which encour­ages users to rely on less sta­ble week­ly builds. The sched­uled branch­ing for releas­es should aid with that, and the CalVer scheme is being intro­duced to sup­port the new release schedule.

In oth­er words, users should expect more release pre­dictabil­i­ty and have few­er rea­sons to use unsta­ble builds, unless they need to test fix­es for bugs they report­ed or new fea­tures they requested.

If you are inter­est­ed in the devel­op­ers’ per­spec­tive, please see this forum announce­ment.

What is a CalVer scheme?

The two most com­mon ways to ver­sion a soft­ware release are seman­tic ver­sion­ing, or SemVer for short, and cal­en­dar ver­sion­ing, or CalVer.

FreeCAD used to rely on a form of seman­tic ver­sion­ing with releas­es like 1.0 and 1.1 rep­re­sent­ing major updates and releas­es like 0.21.2 or 1.1.1 rep­re­sent­ing updates with bug­fix­es (patch releases).

Cal­en­dar ver­sion­ing schemes typ­i­cal­ly con­tain the num­ber of the year and then either the sequen­tial num­ber of the release with­in a year or the month of the release. The par­tic­u­lar CalVer for­mat we are switch­ing to is YY.N, where YY is the two-dig­it year of the Jan­u­ary qual­i­ty-focused release, and N is the sequen­tial release num­ber with­in that year (1, 2, or 3). 

The next major releas­es will be 26.3, 27.1, 27,2, and 27.3. Patch releas­es will fol­low the YY.N.P for­mat, e.g., 27.1.1.

What’s the new development cycle?

We set­tled on three major releas­es per year as a com­pro­mise between suf­fi­cient fre­quen­cy of releas­es and hav­ing enough time to make qual­i­ty releases.

The releas­es with­in each year will have a slight­ly dif­fer­ent focus.

YY.1 release, branched on Jan­u­ary 31, will be qual­i­ty-focused. This means the team will pri­or­i­tize bug­fix­es over new features.

YY.2 and YY.2 releas­es, branched on May 31 and Sep­tem­ber 30, respec­tive­ly, will be more like reg­u­lar FreeCAD releas­es you already know, with a more or less equal share of new fea­tures and fixes.

The accept­ed pro­pos­al also cov­ers top­ics like fea­ture freezes, the sta­bi­liza­tion peri­od, release can­di­date sched­ul­ing, and more. You can read the pro­pos­al on GitHub.

How the plan was discussed

Jack­son Ours­land and Kacper Donat made the pro­pos­al and dis­cussed it with the broad­er com­mu­ni­ty of devel­op­ers on GitHub and dur­ing the bi-month­ly dev calls. After the dis­cus­sions and some flesh­ing out, the com­mu­ni­ty vot­ed to accept it.

When is the first CalVer release?

The first release under this new scheme will be 26.3. We will cre­ate a branch for it on 30 Sep­tem­ber 2026. Releas­es are expect­ed to ship with­in 4–6 weeks after branch­ing, with 2–3 release candidates.

The devel­op­ment builds are already ver­sioned as 26.3dev.