1. =============

  2. API stability

  3. =============

  4. 

  5. Django is committed to API stability and forwards-compatibility. In a nutshell,

  6. this means that code you develop against a version of Django will continue to

  7. work with future releases. You may need to make minor changes when upgrading

  8. the version of Django your project uses: see the "Backwards incompatible

  9. changes" section of the :doc:`release note </releases/index>` for the version

  10. or versions to which you are upgrading.

  11. 

  12. At the same time as making API stability a very high priority, Django is also

  13. committed to continual improvement, along with aiming for "one way to do it"

  14. (eventually) in the APIs we provide. This means that when we discover clearly

  15. superior ways to do things, we will deprecate and eventually remove the old

  16. ways. Our aim is to provide a modern, dependable web framework of the highest

  17. quality that encourages best practices in all projects that use it. By using

  18. incremental improvements, we try to avoid both stagnation and large breaking

  19. upgrades.

  20. 

  21. What "stable" means

  22. ===================

  23. 

  24. In this context, stable means:

  25. 

  26. - All the public APIs (everything in this documentation) will not be moved

  27.   or renamed without providing backwards-compatible aliases.

  28. 

  29. - If new features are added to these APIs -- which is quite possible --

  30.   they will not break or change the meaning of existing methods. In other

  31.   words, "stable" does not (necessarily) mean "complete."

  32. 

  33. - If, for some reason, an API declared stable must be removed or replaced, it

  34.   will be declared deprecated but will remain in the API for at least two

  35.   feature releases. Warnings will be issued when the deprecated method is

  36.   called.

  37. 

  38.   See :ref:`official-releases` for more details on how Django's version

  39.   numbering scheme works, and how features will be deprecated.

  40. 

  41. - We'll only break backwards compatibility of these APIs without a deprecation

  42.   process if a bug or security hole makes it completely unavoidable.

  43. 

  44. Stable APIs

  45. ===========

  46. 

  47. In general, everything covered in the documentation -- with the exception of

  48. anything in the :doc:`internals area </internals/index>` is considered stable.

  49. 

  50. Exceptions

  51. ==========

  52. 

  53. There are a few exceptions to this stability and backwards-compatibility

  54. promise.

  55. 

  56. Security fixes

  57. --------------

  58. 

  59. If we become aware of a security problem -- hopefully by someone following our

  60. :ref:`security reporting policy <reporting-security-issues>` -- we'll do

  61. everything necessary to fix it. This might mean breaking backwards

  62. compatibility; security trumps the compatibility guarantee.

  63. 

  64. APIs marked as internal

  65. -----------------------

  66. 

  67. Certain APIs are explicitly marked as "internal" in a couple of ways:

  68. 

  69. - Some documentation refers to internals and mentions them as such. If the

  70.   documentation says that something is internal, we reserve the right to

  71.   change it.

  72. 

  73. - Functions, methods, and other objects prefixed by a leading underscore

  74.   (``_``). This is the standard Python way of indicating that something is

  75.   private; if any method starts with a single ``_``, it's an internal API.
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