Possible New Action: Auto-robotic Deprecation

[minkimcello]

Context

From this pull request on bigtest, I was removing unused packages from the monorepo and the discussion of deprecating those packages was initiated.

But first to address some of the comments from that pull request:

@taras: should we add a mechanism to release action to somehow deprecate packages?

• Or we could create a separate action for it.

@cowboyd: what about adding a deprecated flag to the package.json

• Wouldn't this require us to keep the package we want to remove (or at least the package.json) on the repo for at least one cycle? tag deprecate flag and push => let action run to deprecate packages => remove package and push

Solution

Create a new action to deprecate packages.

Approach

• Rename synchronize-with-npm to release and create the new action as deprecate
• Have it run on push to master branch.
• The action would compile the name property of every package.json of its latest (presumably from a pull request merge) commit and the one prior.
• Compare the two list to see if any packages were removed and compile list of removed packages.
• Loop over the list and run npm deprecate.

[taras]

@minkimcello I think the workflow should be,

1. create a PR which adds deprecated: true flag to package.json
2. merge it to master, release action checks for deprecated: true flag and runs npm deprecate

@cowboyd is this what you had in mind?

[minkimcello]

@taras Using deprecate flag on package.json:

1. Create a PR to deprecate package
2. Merge it to master to trigger release action to deprecate package
3. Create another PR to remove packages from repo
4. Merge to master

Using deprecate action separate from release action:

1. Create a PR to remove package
2. Merge to master

The only downside to this is when we want to rename packages. But I don't know how we would approach that.

[taras]

I'm not a big fan of making separate actions. Ultimately, I want everything living in 1 utility... maybe we have different actions but I'm not sure yet.

@cowboyd what do you think?

[minkimcello]

Resolved with #58, #59, and #60.