| ============= |
| API stability |
| ============= |
|
|
| Django is committed to API stability and forwards-compatibility. In a nutshell, |
| this means that code you develop against a version of Django will continue to |
| work with future releases. You may need to make minor changes when upgrading |
| the version of Django your project uses: see the "Backwards incompatible |
| changes" section of the :doc:`release note </releases/index>` for the version |
| or versions to which you are upgrading. |
|
|
| At the same time as making API stability a very high priority, Django is also |
| committed to continual improvement, along with aiming for "one way to do it" |
| (eventually) in the APIs we provide. This means that when we discover clearly |
| superior ways to do things, we will deprecate and eventually remove the old |
| ways. Our aim is to provide a modern, dependable web framework of the highest |
| quality that encourages best practices in all projects that use it. By using |
| incremental improvements, we try to avoid both stagnation and large breaking |
| upgrades. |
|
|
| What "stable" means |
| =================== |
|
|
| In this context, stable means: |
|
|
| - All the public APIs (everything in this documentation) will not be moved |
| or renamed without providing backwards-compatible aliases. |
|
|
| - If new features are added to these APIs -- which is quite possible -- |
| they will not break or change the meaning of existing methods. In other |
| words, "stable" does not (necessarily) mean "complete." |
|
|
| - If, for some reason, an API declared stable must be removed or replaced, it |
| will be declared deprecated but will remain in the API for at least two |
| feature releases. Warnings will be issued when the deprecated method is |
| called. |
|
|
| See :ref:`official-releases` for more details on how Django's version |
| numbering scheme works, and how features will be deprecated. |
|
|
| - We'll only break backwards compatibility of these APIs without a deprecation |
| process if a bug or security hole makes it completely unavoidable. |
|
|
| Stable APIs |
| =========== |
|
|
| In general, everything covered in the documentation -- with the exception of |
| anything in the :doc:`internals area </internals/index>` is considered stable. |
|
|
| Exceptions |
| ========== |
|
|
| There are a few exceptions to this stability and backwards-compatibility |
| promise. |
|
|
| Security fixes |
| -------------- |
|
|
| If we become aware of a security problem -- hopefully by someone following our |
| :ref:`security reporting policy <reporting-security-issues>` -- we'll do |
| everything necessary to fix it. This might mean breaking backwards |
| compatibility; security trumps the compatibility guarantee. |
|
|
| APIs marked as internal |
| ----------------------- |
|
|
| Certain APIs are explicitly marked as "internal" in a couple of ways: |
|
|
| - Some documentation refers to internals and mentions them as such. If the |
| documentation says that something is internal, we reserve the right to |
| change it. |
|
|
| - Functions, methods, and other objects prefixed by a leading underscore |
| (``_``). This is the standard Python way of indicating that something is |
| private; if any method starts with a single ``_``, it's an internal API. |
|
|
