xc-llm-ascend/docs/source/developer_guide/versioning_policy.md

Versioning policy

Starting with vLLM 0.7.x, the vLLM Ascend Plugin (vllm-project/vllm-ascend) project follows the PEP 440 to publish matching with vLLM (vllm-project/vllm).

vLLM Ascend Plugin versions

Each vllm-ascend release will be versioned: v[major].[minor].[micro][rcN][.postN] (such as v0.7.1rc1, v0.7.1, v0.7.1.post1)

• Final releases: will typically be released every 3 months, will take the vLLM upstream release plan and Ascend software product release plan into comprehensive consideration.
• Pre releases: will typically be released on demand, ending with rcN, represents the Nth release candidate version, to support early testing by our users prior to a final release.
• Post releases: will typically be released on demand to support to address minor errors in a final release. It's different from PEP-440 post release note suggestion, it will contain actual bug fixes considering that the final release version should be matched strictly with the vLLM final release version (v[major].[minor].[micro]). The post version has to be published as a patch version of the final release.

For example:

• v0.7.x: it's the first final release to match the vLLM v0.7.x version.
• v0.7.1rc1: will be the first pre version of vllm-ascend.
• v0.7.1.post1: will be the post release if the v0.7.1 release has some minor errors.

Branch policy

vllm-ascend has main branch and dev branch.

• main: main branch，corresponds to the vLLM main branch, and is continuously monitored for quality through Ascend CI.
• vX.Y.Z-dev: development branch, created with part of new releases of vLLM. For example, v0.7.1-dev is the dev branch for vLLM v0.7.1 version.

Usually, a commit should be ONLY first merged in the main branch, and then backported to the dev branch to reduce maintenance costs as much as possible.

Maintenance branch and EOL:

The branch status will be in one of the following states:

Branch	Time frame	Summary
Maintained	Approximately 2-3 minor versions	All bugfixes are appropriate. Releases produced, CI commitment.
Unmaintained	Community interest driven	All bugfixes are appropriate. No Releases produced, No CI commitment
End of Life (EOL)	N/A	Branch no longer accepting changes

Branch state

Note that vllm-ascend will only be released for a certain vLLM release version rather than all versions. Hence, You might see only part of versions have dev branches (such as only 0.7.1-dev / 0.7.3-dev but no 0.7.2-dev), this is as expected.

Usually, each minor version of vLLM (such as 0.7) will correspond to a vllm-ascend version branch and support its latest version (for example, we plan to support version 0.7.3) as following shown:

Branch	Status	Note
main	Maintained	CI commitment for vLLM main branch
v0.7.3-dev	Maintained	CI commitment for vLLM 0.7.3 version
v0.7.1-dev	Unmaintained	Replaced by v0.7.3-dev

Release Compatibility Matrix

Following is the Release Compatibility Matrix for vLLM Ascend Plugin:

vllm-ascend	vLLM	Python	Stable CANN	PyTorch/torch_npu
v0.7.1rc1	v0.7.1	3.9 - 3.12	8.0.0	2.5.1 / 2.5.1.dev20250218

Release cadence

Next final release (v0.7.x) window

Date	Event
March 2025	Release candidates, v0.7.3rc1
March 2025	Final release passes, match vLLM v0.7.x latest: v0.7.1 or v0.7.3