Consider changesets to automate releases and versioning

[evoactivity]

Right now the workflows use gitversion, a package.json updater, and semantic-release to handle this. I'd like us to consider https://github.com/changesets/changesets to simplify the workflows. I can do the work neccessary.

It might not play nicely with vscode marketplace or openvsx, I'll have to investigate that.
changesets/changesets#1297 should be possible

I've noticed a bunch of the @emberjs projects now use the home brewed release-plan, I'm not sure what the benefits of that are over using changesets? I use changesets on a few different open source libraries and like the workflow it provides.

@lifeart @NullVoxPopuli any thougths?

[NullVoxPopuli]

release-plan is like changesets, but you don't need to commit anything to git. you can manage the whole release process from the porcelain.

I migrated all my stuff off of changesets, because release-plan has been so easy.

changesets requires you push to each PR to add the changeset info for the PR. It's nice if you want very verbose change entries, but is significantly more cumbersome.

[lifeart]

@NullVoxPopuli it seems we may need release bot and release UI, to get rid of manual stuff around, owners could login using 2fa GH, fill release notes and publish things.

We configure release notes in UI, fill fields, confirm button, and bot do all the stuff

[lifeart]

In my old ember-tooling repos I'm trying to have things as simple as possible, at the very end, changelog could be backfilled, but iterations speed matters.

[lifeart]

At the moment I could publish syntax updates from phone, just merging PR (with ability to not publish it, depends on merge commit). And imho it's a really good motivation for contributors (not pretending that it's greatly implemented)

[evoactivity]

because most contributors just don't have the context to write a good changeset.

Then how do they have the context to write a good PR at all? If someone can't describe what they changed and why, should you even accept their code changes into your repo?

I agree if you want to rewrite their changeset, it's cumbersome, and changing the PR title is simple. That's why I said you'd convinced me 😆. I do see the benefits of using the PR labels and title as the basis for the changeset (in most cases anyway, I saw your request for basing the changelog on the PR description was rejected, which I think was a good idea 🙈).

I don't have time to implement it atm, and it needs to be implemented idempotently, which may require direct marketplace integration or something. for publish, we have a doesVersionExist check, and then early exit.

I could probably take a stab at something, but I do think the publish step should be able to come from outside of release-plan. Making release-plan responsible for how something is actually published could become cumbersome. We add extension marketplaces today, but what if someone wants to publish to a private package repo, or release a docker image, and push that to the github docker repo instead of dockerhub. Someone might want to do something completely bespoke in terms of where the package ends up and they'd have to fork the entire project and maintain it themselves. I might even want to use release-plan to publish an ember application and have it defer to ember deploy, or a shell script.

Just thinking outloud. What about something like having a custom script be passed in to release-plan, that exports a default class, looking something like this?

import { PublishStrategy } from 'release-plan';

export default class VSCodeStrategy extends PublishStrategy {
  async doesVersionExist() {
    // do thing to determine version exists

    if (itExists) {
      return true;
    }
    
    return false;
  }

  async publish() {
    // do your publish steps

    if (isPublished) {
      return true;
    }
    
    return false;
  }
}

I could probably work on something like that over the coming weekend if you think that's a viable path to explore.

[NullVoxPopuli]

oooo I like this. Let's see if @mansona has thoughts on that design for custom publishing