The current release schema is the following:

Pre-release: <Major>.<Minor>.<Patch>.<pre-release-label>

Examples: 3.1.0.Alpha1, 3.1.0.Beta1, 3.1.0.CR1

Not SemVer compatible - it should be <Major>.<Minor>.<Patch>-<pre-release>

Release: <Major>.<Minor>.<Patch>.Final

Examples: 3.1.0.Final, 3.1.2.Final

Not SemVer compatible  it should be <Major>.<Minor>.<Patch>

The problem

Helm permits to search for charts and its version with the following command

helm search repo local --versions

It only lists release versions based on the semver spec. This means that for our charts it will show an empty result. Only adding the —devel the versions are shown since we are telling Helm to show also pre-release versions. 

The more critical problem is that if the users run the following command

helm install debezium-platform debezium/debezium-platform --set database.enabled=true --set domain.url=platform.debezium.io

They will get the following error 

Error: INSTALLATION FAILED: chart "debezium-platform" matching  not found in debezium index. (try 'helm repo update'): no chart version found for debezium-platform-

This is because Helm is not able to find a release version. So the workaround is to use the –version 3.1.0-final.

So the usage is not smooth for helm charts users and deviates from the expected standards. 

Altough the main issue is with the helm, we decided for a coherent versioning schema. Since this is a quite big change we also decided to approach this change in step:

• Apply a workaround for helm so that the final release will not have the "-final"
• Add an additional tag to our images that is SemVer compliant
• Change maven artifacts to the SemVer compliant for the Debezium 4.0 release.