[Cython] Cython 0.29 – or 29.0 ?

[Stefan Behnel]

Hello everyone,

I had a request during my talk at EuroPython this year to help the aspiring
Cython users out there convince their managers to accept Cython in their
tech stack.

Cython has been around for more than a decade now, has been in heavy
production use pretty much all of that time, has proven to have everything
it needs as a programming language, and still resorts to a 0.x versioning
scheme.

I think it's time to leave the 0.x behind us and make it clear that it's a
reliable programming language that won't easily change in a major code
breaking way anymore.

Which version should we choose next? Some projects have adopted year based
release schemes, e.g. pip recently jumped from 10.x to 18.0. Browsers
follow the marketing path and boldly increase their version number by a
whole 1 on every feature release. I'd be happy to follow them and release a
Cython 29.0 next, mostly to make it clear that we're not really changing
anything from the previous release cycles, but really just move the
versioning scheme one place to the left to get rid of the uninformative
"0." prefix.

What do you think?

Stefan