Versioning and changes about geoparquet HOT 2 CLOSED

Hey @karunakar2 - apologies for the slow response.

So in the 0.x / alpha stage of things the core group is not able to provide an forward compatibility promises - as long as we're in 0.x we reserve the right to make backwards incompatible changes, though we don't anticipate any and certainly value backwards compatibility so we'll do our best. And that could be a change in the programming interface or the storage file level (though would more likely be in the metadata of the storage file, we likely wouldn't change wkb). The good news is we'll soon be going to 'beta.1', see #122 I still don't think we'd fully promise that beta.1 will be backwards compatible, but we'll try really hard to be sure that it can.

So most likely files generated out of 0.4 will be future readable - we don't anticipate any changes that would make it not readable, but don't want to commit to that till 1.0.0. At that point we'll use SemVer, and any forward compatible change will mean a 1.x release, and any backwards incompatible change will be a major version bump, like to 2.0.

from geoparquet.

To add one thing to what @cholmes already said: even in the unlikely case there would still be a change before 1.0.0, implementations can still support reading older versions as well. For example, speaking for the GeoPandas reader, I think we would certainly support reading <1.0 files for quite some time.

from geoparquet.