Create smart contract release process

[mrice32]

Why

We would like to have a consistent way for external developers to access contract ABIs and addresses as they are deployed on different networks.

How

Proposal:

• The smart contracts will use the usual conventional commit mechanism to determine whether changes are major, minor, or patch releases. All ABI changes (outside of constructors) are considered major releases.
• A release will come with deployed addresses on each supported network that at least match the ABIs that are exported from the package.
• Unless there are extenuating circumstances, the deployed smart contracts should exactly match the implementation defined in the git tag and artifacts in the release. If this is not the case, it should be noted in the release notes.
• Ideally, all of the deployed addresses should be verified. There is ongoing work to make this possible, but it may not always be the case initially.

This release process is mostly semantic, as it will be implemented using human judgement. However, this task tracks the addition of this to the README of the core package.

Resolution

A README outlining the release process in core.

Difficulty Score [1-10]

3: ~1 hour

[mrice32]

Probably out of scope in the initial release process is curating a registry of deployed financial contracts of which there can be multiple, immutable deployments of the same contract type.

One proposed solution to that is having a mapping from ContractType X DeploymentName -> ABI X address to allow users to access them.

To actually implement something like that, here are some thoughts/options (although there are probably others!):

• Take advantage of npm aliases and have core depend on older versions of itself (a little strange).
• Similar to ^ except have core have these as dev dependencies and package only the necessary ones up as part of the "build" process.
• Keep older versions of the contracts (or their interfaces or their abis) around under different names and map to them.

While this will be important down the road, the most of the asks from developers have originated from wanting to use our contracts on testnet and having easy access to the ABIs and singleton addresses there so they can deploy their own financial contracts. We also don't currently have any legacy financial contracts; even proposed updates to the EMP will not affect the ABI.