Change format of @next and @experimental release versions from <number>-<sha> to <number>-<sha>-<date> to make them more human readable. This format still preserves the ability for us to easily map a version number to the changes it contains, while also being able to more easily know at a glance how recent a release is.
This does not mean that a release of 18.0 is imminent, only that the
main branch includes breaking changes.
Also updates the versioning scheme of the `@next` channel to include
the upcoming semver number, as well as the word "alpha" to indicate the
stability of the release.
- Before: 0.0.0-e0d9b28999
- After: 18.0.0-alpha-e0d9b28999
Now that we track package versions in source, `@latest` builds should
be fully reproducible for a given commit. We can prepare the packages in
CI and store them as artifacts, the same way we do for `@next` and
`@experimental`.
Eventually this can replace the interactive script that we currently
use to swap out the version numbers.
The other nice thing about this approach is that we can run tests in CI
to verify that the packages are releasable, instead of waiting until
right before publish.
I named the output directory `oss-stable-semver`, to distinguish from
the `@next` prereleases that are located at `oss-stable`. I don't love
this naming. I'd prefer to use the name of the corresponding npm dist
tag. I'll do that in a follow-up, though, since the `oss-stable` name is
referenced in a handful of places.
Current naming (after this PR):
- `oss-experimental` → `@experimental`
- `oss-stable` → `@next`
- `oss-stable-semver` → `@latest`
Proposed naming (not yet implemented, requires more work):
- `oss-experimental` → `@experimental`
- `oss-next` → `@next`
- `oss-latest` → `@latest`
The versioning scheme for `@next` releases does not include semver
information. Like `@experimental`, the versions are based only on the
hash, i.e. `0.0.0-<commit_sha>`. The reason we do this is to prevent
the use of a tilde (~) or caret (^) to match a range of
prerelease versions.
For `@experimental`, I think this rationale still makes sense — those
releases are very unstable, with frequent breaking changes. But `@next`
is not as volatile. It represents the next stable release. So, I think
we can afford to include an actual verison number at the beginning of
the string instead of `0.0.0`.
We can also add a label that indicates readiness of the upcoming
release, like "alpha", "beta", "rc", etc.
To prepare for this the new versioning scheme, I updated the build
script. However, **this PR does not enable the new versioning scheme
yet**. I left a TODO above the line that we'll change once we're ready.
We need to specify the expected next version numbers for each package,
somewhere. These aren't encoded anywhere today — we don't specify
version numbers until right before publishing to `@latest`, using an
interactive script: `prepare-release-from-npm`.
Instead, what we can do is track these version numbers in a module. I
added `ReactVersions.js` that acts as the single source of truth for
every package's version. The build script uses this module to build the
`@next` packages.
In the future, I want to start building the `@latest` packages the same
way we do `@next` and `@experimental`. (What we do now is download a
`@next` release from npm and swap out its version numbers.) Then we
could run automated tests in CI to confirm the packages are releasable,
instead of waiting to verify that right before publish.
Fixes issue in the new build workflow where the experimental packages do
not include "experimental" in the version string. This was because the
previous approach relied on the RELEASE_CHANNEL environment variable,
which we are no longer setting in the outer CI job, since we use the
same job to build both channels. To solve, I moved the version
post-processing into the build script itself.
Only affects the new build workflow. Old workflow is unchanged.
Longer term, I would like to remove version numbers from the source
entirely, including the package.jsons. We should use a placeholder
instead; that's mostly how it already works, since the release script
swaps out the versions before we publish to stable.
The goal is to simplify our CI pipeline so that all configurations
are built and tested in a single workflow.
As a first step, this adds a new build script entry point that builds
both the experimental and stable release channels into a single
artifacts directory.
The script works by wrapping the existing build script (which only
builds a single release channel at a time), then post-processing the
results to match the desired filesystem layout. A future version of the
build script would output the files directly without post-processing.
Because many parts of our infra depend on the existing layout of the
build artifacts directory, I have left the old workflows untouched.
We can incremental migrate to the new layout, then delete the old
workflows after we've finished.
