microsoft / microsoft/beachball

Rethink the questions beachball asks to aid devs in making better decisions

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feature
Dominant language
TypeScript
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815
Forks
93
Avg merge
2d 13h
Merged PRs (30d)
12

Description

Today, when beachball detects changes, it prompts for patch/minor/major and asks for a description. This leads to unhealthy choices for devs who can't recite the differences between them. For pre-release (v0) packages, this becomes even more confusing and beachball gives no additional information here, pushing the burden to the developer to "just know" that the package is a pre-release and that v0s have different rules about semver resolution.

One suggestion could be something like this:

Non-prerelease questions:

What kind of change are you making to the api surface of `package`?

( ) patch: No api surface changes, only changes within the api.
( ) minor: Some backwards-compatible api surface updates or additions, or visual updates which don't impact layout space.
( ) major:  Changes which could cause compilation breaks for consumers or visual shift in UX. This may include removal of api surface or breaking changes to existing apis.

For pre-release packages:

What kind of change are you making to the api surface of `package`?
Note: This package is a pre-release, where semver rules are different. Read the descriptions carefully.

( ) patch: Some backwards-compatible api surface updates or additions, or visual updates which don't impact layout space.
( ) minor: Changes which could cause compilation breaks for consumers or visual shift in UX. This may include removal of api surface or breaking changes to existing apis.
( ) release: Release a major v1. Only choose this if you're confident no breaking changes will be needed in this package for a long time.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing where beachball asks for patch, minor, major, and the change description. Compare the proposed non-prerelease and pre-release wording, then verify that the prompts explain the semver choices and offer the distinct v0 release option.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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