Julia pre-release versions and REQUIRE

suppose that I have a registered package that supports only the current development version of Julia and does not support the current stable version of Julia, so in REQUIRE I put:

julia 0.y-

wher 0.y is the current development version. The Julia manual says: “Another scenario is that you are writing the bulk of the code for your package with Julia 0.y and do not want to support the current stable version of Julia. If you choose to do this, simply add julia 0.y- to your REQUIRE. Just remember to change the julia 0.y- to julia 0.y in your REQUIRE file once 0.y is officially released. If you don’t edit the dash cruft you are suggesting that you support both the development and stable versions of the same version number! That would be madness.”

I have two questions:

  1. Does this mean that as soon as 0.y is officially released I should remove the dash cruft and tag a new release of the package?
  2. What happens if I forget to remove the dash cruft once 0.y is officially released? Would this cause issues with package management? I’m probably missing something obvious, but I don’t understand in what sense suggesting support for both the development and stable versions of the same version number would be mad.

It won’t cause issues, but once an official release is available, given you are no longer testing on prereleases, it would be better to set the floor to an actual release. Otherwise the prerelease claims to be supporting even the very first commit after the previous release branched, which is likely not the case.

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Thanks for clarifying!