Release process

[davesnx]

Currently, the release process has a few issues, the root is that it is done manually, so some steps might be skipped which results in problems:

• npm's published version hasn't been updated in 2 years. It's stuck at 3.7.0 https://www.npmjs.com/package/@esy-ocaml/reason while 3.8.2 has been out since Oct 15, 2022
• versions numbers are un-sync everywhere, since refmt --version often lies (is going away on https://github.com/reasonml/reason/pull/2701), bs-platform shipping with a packaged refmt for 3.6.2 makes stuff more confusing as well.
• The only way to use a "nightly" release of Reason, you need to pin which is a sub-par experience when Reason is as a transitive dependency.
• We manually check if an entry to CHANGELOG is added (instead of a tool checking it for us)
• Most scripts (opam-release, release-check and test-with-version) are probably unused, wrong and rely on personal GH tokens.

Opening this issue as gathering information to fix it and if it's worth the effort. There have been a few issues in the past: https://github.com/reasonml/reason/issues/2418 https://github.com/reasonml/reason/issues/2461 https://github.com/reasonml/reason/issues/2453

Proposed solution

GH actions should handle all release processes, publish to npm and open the PR to opam-repository.

version=X.X.X make pre_release

This should do everything for you:

• Update accordingly version everywhere: esy.json, reason.json, rtop.json and dune-project
• Create a git tag
• Create a commit message
• Push to origin with tags

The CI should handle:

• Running node ./scripts/esy-prepublish.js

• cd _release/XXX/package/

• npm publish --access=public

• Running opam-publish

Notes: We can't use %%VERSION%% and dune subts in esy.json files since esy doesn't recognise %%VERSION%% as a valid one. We would need to do something less fancy:

@echo "Updating packages with version: $(version)"
@sed -i '' 's/(version .*)/(version $(version))/' dune-project
@sed -i '' 's/"version": .*"/"version": '\"$(version)\"'/g' esy.json
@sed -i '' 's/"version": .*"/"version": '\"$(version)\"'/g' reason.json
@sed -i '' 's/"version": .*"/"version": '\"$(version)\"'/g' rtop.json

[anmonteiro]

@davesnx we should simplify this:

• no one consumes reason from npm anymore, so we could just stop publishing it there
• the esy files are basically useless and only used to test in CI, so they're completely irrelevant for the release
• this leaves us with the current dune-build-info and dune-release workflow, which has been working quite well

what do you thinK?

[davesnx]

I'm happy with the current workflow of opam and github releases. Esy users can still benefit with @opam/reason, so it's good.

I'm still annoyed by legacy versions on npm, and some scripts in makefile, I might cleanup those.