Release Schedule

WPE WebKit follows a 6-month development cycle:

• There are two feature releases are done every year, typically in March and September.
• Within feature releases, there may be any number of bug-fix releases.
• Development releases are the base for the feature releases that follow them. They do not follow a fixed schedule in the release cycle.

WPE WebKit and WebKitGTK share a fair amount of code. Therefore, both projects produce their feature releases simultaneously, and share the same release branches. For bug-fix releases, the release teams for both projects try to sync their version numbers as well as they can.

Versioning Scheme

Version numbers follow the major.minor.patch numbering scheme. Changes to the major version signify considerable architectural or API changes; the minor version number changes throughout the development cycle. Even numbers indicate stable releases and odd ones development releases. Lastly, the patch number is incremented for each release, and for stable release candidates it is bumped to 90.

For stable releases the following is always true, as long as the major version number stays the same:

• New patch releases are guaranteed to be backward-compatible both at the API and ABI level.
• New minor releases may contain new features and backward-compatible changes in the public API. In general, the ABI will remain compatible as well, because we actively avoid breaking it unless strictly needed.

Compatible Components

The following table summarizes which stable releases of libwpe, WPE WebKit, WPEBackend-fdo, and Cog are compatible and tested with each other (updated October 2024). Distributors and packagers are strongly advised to use the versions listed below.

Notes:

• libwpe used to be called wpebackend before version 1.0.x — it was renamed to avoid confusion.
• Cog adopted the same versioning scheme as the rest of the components starting with the 0.6 series.