Backward compatibility
Merchants and developers want the process of upgrading between revisions of Magento 2 to be as easy as possible. For merchants, the process must be cost-effective, while developers want their extensions to be forward-compatible for as long as possible.
To help mitigate these concerns, this release introduces a backward compatibility (BC) policy for PHP code. Magento 2.0 uses Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 to indicate whether a change breaks backward compatibility. Version numbers are in the format MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, where:
- MAJOR indicates incompatible API changes
- MINOR indicates backward-compatible functionality has been added
- PATCH indicates backward-compatible bug fixes
The backward compatibility policy applies to PHP code annotated with @api.
We promise to be backward compatible for classes and methods annotated with @api within MINOR and PATCH updates to our components. As changes are introduced, we annotate methods with @deprecated. The methods are removed only with the next MAJOR component version. MAJOR changes are scheduled no more than once per year; most likely during the holiday season when site changes are unlikely.
For more information, see Backward compatibility in the PHP Developer Guide.
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