Support for prelease versions like 1.0.0-beta.1

[mmun]

See https://github.com/npm/node-semver#prerelease-identifiers

[slindberg]

I'd like to support this for sure. A good use case is:

0.1.0 → 1.0.0-beta.0 → 1.0.0-beta.1 → 1.0.0

The question is what series of ember release commands results in these versions?

One possibility:

# New version, v0.1.0
$ ember release

# Adds 'beta' suffix starting at 0, assumes major version update, v1.0.0-beta.0
$ ember release --pre beta

# Increments pre-release version,  v1.0.0-beta.1
$ ember release

# Removes prerelease suffix, v1.0.0
$ ember release --major

Questions:

• Should adding the --pre flag imply --major?
• What happens when its used with a version over 1.0.0? Is the transition to 1.0.0 the only use case for prerelease versions (e.g. 2.0.0-beta.0)?
• Should --pre be required to increment the prerelease?
• What happens when --minor is used when version is a prerelease?
• How should changing the suffix be handled (e.g. 1.0.0-beta.5 → 1.0.0-rc.0)?
• Should prerelease increments start at 0 as the spec implies, or 1 as Ember has done in the past?

[mmun]

It seems best to stick to the behavior of semver to minimize the documentation you need to maintain. With semver there is premajor, preminor and prepatch (here's some tests).

I'm not too sure about supporting Ember's numbering. You could allow chaining multiple increment commands, e.g. ember release --preminor beta --pre beta. Kind of a mouthful but I wouldn't want to encourage doing it anyways :P

[mmun]

A dubious behaviour of semver is that using --pre when you're not already in a prerelease version will do a --prepatch. See test. Arguably that should throw instead, or at least default to something more common like premajor, as you suggested. I think it's fine to make ember-cli-release stricter than semver.

[slindberg]

Hm, this is much stickier than I originally was thinking. I agree that ember release should be stricter than semver for happy paths.

I'm going to be AFK for the next couple weeks, so this will unfortunately have to wait a while. If you want to open a PR, I'll see if I can find some time to review next week. Thanks for the input :beers:

[mmun]

@slindberg Oh yeah no sweat. I was just starting the conversation :)

[cibernox]

I found myself needing this today. Has any work begun on this?

[mmun]

It could be a relatively simple PR if we just add command line arguments that map directly to the semver commands.

--premajor [name]
--preminor [name]
--prepatch [name]
--prerelease [name]

An example sequence starting at 1.2.3:

> ember release --premajor alpha
2.0.0-alpha.0
> ember release --prerelease
2.0.0-alpha.1
> ember release --prerelease beta
2.0.0-beta.0
> ember release --prerelease
2.0.0-beta.1
> ember release --major
2.0.0

[slindberg]

@cibernox I don't have the bandwidth to work on this, so PRs are definitely welcome.

I like @mmun's KISS suggestion, except that I'd like to keep it so that ember release always increments in the least-impactful way by default. For example this is what would happen with the implicit --patch argument:

> ember release --premajor alpha
2.0.0-alpha.0
> ember release
2.0.0

Incrementing the version to 2.0.0-alpha.1, instead of 2.0.0 would be less dangerous for the user.