Set Development Status classifier to Production/Stable
Sets the Development Status trove classifier to 5 - Production/Stable and removes the per-stage classifier-flip step from RELEASE.md. Reverts the classifier portion of #2831.
Motivation and Context
#2831 set this to 3 - Alpha on the basis that we're publishing alphas. After looking into it more, the ecosystem convention is overwhelmingly to treat this classifier as project maturity, not the pre-release stage of a given artifact:
- Of 22 major projects surveyed, only Django flips it per release stage; the other 19 (pip, setuptools, numpy, pandas, scipy, scikit-learn, matplotlib, Flask, FastAPI, aiohttp, SQLAlchemy, pydantic, httpx, anyio, attrs, hatch, etc.) keep it constant across pre-releases and finals.
- The closest analogues to our v2 — major-version rewrites of foundational libraries — all shipped pre-releases as
5 - Production/Stable: pydantic 2.0a1, aiohttp 4.0.0a1, SQLAlchemy 2.1.0b2. - No installer or resolver (pip, uv, poetry, pdm, flit, hatch) reads this classifier; PyPI uses it only as a search-filter facet. The per-artifact stability signal is already carried by the PEP 440 version segment (
a1→ excluded without--pre) and PyPI's pre-release banner. - Our release process is otherwise tag-only (
dynamic = ["version"]viauv-dynamic-versioning); flipping the classifier per stage was the one remaining manual source edit.
PEP 792 does note that trove classifiers are mechanically per-distribution rather than project-wide — but treats that as a limitation, which is why it introduced project-status-markers as the replacement mechanism.
Companion: #2976 bumps v1.x that branch from 4 - Beta (unchanged since Nov 2024) to 5 - Production/Stable as well.
How Has This Been Tested?
n/a — metadata only.
Breaking Changes
None.
Types of changes
- Documentation update
Checklist
- I have read the MCP Documentation
- My code follows the repository's style guidelines
- New and existing tests pass locally
- I have added appropriate error handling — n/a
- I have added or updated documentation as needed