[Discussion] Exploring a release strategy that reduces update fatigue

Hi @gajus,

Massive kudos on the relentless maintenance of eslint-plugin-jsdoc. The activity in this repo is amazing!

I wanted to open a discussion about the release frequency from a user's perspective. While we all love well-maintained software, the current pace of releases (often several per day) presents some practical challenges for teams that rely on it:

It becomes very hard to manually scan the changelog for meaningful changes when there are numerous entries for minor docs fixes or typos.

Automated tools like Dependabot or Renovate create a huge number of pull requests, which can overwhelm developers.

In corporate environments with strict auditing, each new version requires a review, making such a high volume unsustainable.

I'm wondering if we, as a community, could brainstorm a strategy that balances your awesome productivity with user manageability. Perhaps:

Batch updates: Group non-urgent changes (docs, refactors) for a single daily or weekly release.

Release lanes: Use a @beta or @dev dist-tag for very frequent commits, and only promote a stable version every few days.

Summary changelog: A weekly summary of changes could be just as effective as individual release notes for minor tweaks.

What are your thoughts on this? Is there a workflow that would make this easier for you as well? I see you are fixing issues recently.

Thanks again for everything you do.

(I am going to take it down my account permanently, because I am not interested in GitHub anymore, but I will continue to use your plugin in any case and I wish that you have the chance to continue this discussion with other people.)

[voxpelli]

That would entail swapping semantic-release for something like release-please. I find the release-please flow much preferable due to eg. the mentioned reasons

[thernstig]

I concur. @brettz9 is amazing with his energy and eagerness to listen whilst being humble.

[brettz9]

Thank you for your kind words. The irony of having a chronic health condition impacting energy and concentration (ME/CFS) can be to liberate one to have more energy for work on low-stress pet projects.

As far as the churn, I don't expect too many weeks as busy as recently, as I do not always contribute at this pace, and there were some particular difficulties in getting CJS exports working (which are now resolved).

[thernstig]

To add, I agree that a slightly more paced release cadence would be nice.

[vtintillier]

Seems we no longer have 3-5 releases per day, but we still have at least one release per day, which is quite impressive.
I too have issues with the noise generated by this in automated dependencies update (Renovate), but I think I will just configure this package to update like once per week max.

[brettz9]

Barring any feedback from @gajus, it's hard to say from my end what might happen in the future.

I plan to release now no more than once a day unless something is really broken, so you may want to act accordingly. FWIW, there is only one more day in my confirmed backlog which I plan to publish tomorrow, so it may go back to a calmer schedule after this, but hesitate to say for sure.

Unless @gajus wishes to revive, I'll close the issue. Thank you all for your feedback.