vllm-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
v0.7.1-dev	Maintained	CI commitment for vLLM 0.7.1 version

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
February 2025	Release candidates (RC1), v0.7.1rc1
March 2025	Release candidates (RC2), v0.7.1rc2 or v0.7.3rc1
March 2025	Final release passes, match vLLM v0.7.x latest: v0.7.1 or v0.7.3