New way to classify releases on drupal.org

Building on the foundation of the new release system, and to lay the foundation for Drupal core telling you if your site is out of date and in particular telling you if there is a security update available for any of your installed modules, it is now possible for project maintainers to classify their releases. There is a new vocabulary on drupal.org that only applies to releases, called Release type. The possible values are:

Security update

This release contains a critical security update. Any release associated with this term should have a link to the corresponding security announcement in the release notes. Please see the Contacted by the security team. Now what? handbook page about the proper way to handle security-related releases.

Bug fixes

The release should be marked with this if it contains any non-security related bug fixes.

New features

In general, new features should only be added to development branches for your project, but any release that contains new features should have this term.

It's not essential that maintainers go back and classify existing releases with these terms. However, any releases that were created for security updates should probably be classified.

In addition to laying the foundation for the features referenced above, just having these taxonomy terms provides some new useful functionality on drupal.org. For example, there is now an RSS feed of all releases that were created to address security problems:

http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/100/0/feed

This change has been documented at the following handbook pages:

• Developing for Drupal » CVS » Maintaining projects with CVS » Managing releases » Types of releases
• Developing for Drupal » CVS » Maintaining projects with CVS » Managing releases » Release nodes
• About Drupal » Drupal.org feeds

For additional background, you can check out the following issues:

• http://drupal.org/node/136172
• http://drupal.org/node/142120

Enjoy,
-Derek