FYI: Alpha version numbers

[rstacruz]

Hey, this isn't a bug, more of a "just thought I'd let you know", but the alpha version scheme (1.0.0-alpha9) is not lexically sortable. You can test this by doing npm show gatsby versions --json:

npm show gatsby versions --json

  "1.0.0-alpha2",
  "1.0.0-alpha20",
  "1.0.0-alpha21",
  "1.0.0-alpha3",
  "1.0.0-alpha4",
  "1.0.0-alpha5",
  "1.0.0-alpha6",
  "1.0.0-alpha7",
  "1.0.0-alpha8",
  "1.0.0-alpha8-test1",
  "1.0.0-alpha9",
  "1.0.0-alpha9-test1",
  ...
]

The latest alpha (1.0.0-alpha21) doesn't show up at the end of the list. This can be remedied by naming it as 1.0.0-alpha.21.

From semver.org:

http://semver.org/#spec-item-9
A pre-release version MAY be denoted by appending a hyphen and a series of dot separated identifiers immediately following the patch version.
Examples: 1.0.0-alpha, 1.0.0-alpha.1, (...snip)

Great work on Gatsby by the way!

[KyleAMathews]

Oh thank you so much! People have kept complaining about this and I never quite knew what was going wrong. 😅

Oh well, this is how you learn how to open source I guess... I'll make the next alpha using this pattern. Sheesh. (eh, tried that and the . sorts behind 1 so that doesn't work. So either I make up some sort of weird naming scheme (balpha) or I can just wait I guess until I finish my current PR and release a beta).

[rstacruz]

Awesome! Also TIL there's also + for build ID's, like 1.0.0-alpha+20170708, something I'll probably try using when releasing forks of other libs :)

[casprwang]

Now it make sense why gatsby@next kept giving me gatsby@1.0.0-alpha9-test1 from npm 😅. Thanks for sharing.

[casprwang]

btw the current work-around for me is setting

...
    "gatsby": "1.0.0-alpha21",
    "other-gatsby-plugins": "next",
...

in package.json

[rstacruz]

hey just so you know, the 22-alpha is also breaking this scheme. Notice how it's listed after .23:

  "1.0.0-alpha.23",
  "1.0.0-alpha.22-alpha.0be09b66",
  "1.0.0-alpha.22-alpha.18f02e94",
  "1.0.0-alpha.22-alpha.19f7c727",
  "1.0.0-alpha.22-alpha.2d2aa0ef",
  "1.0.0-alpha.22-alpha.96b0b727",
  "1.0.0-alpha.22-alpha.acbc22e8",
  "1.0.0-alpha.test",

May i suggest -alpha.22.1+acbc22e8?

[KyleAMathews]

@rstacruz hrmmm I'm just using lerna publish --canary for this... do you know if there's a way to make this change to how it does releases?

[rstacruz]

oh, i see! lerna seems to prepend -alpha by default. This is still causing weirdness even in the beta versions:

  "1.0.0-beta.1",
  "1.0.0-beta.2",
  "1.0.0-beta.1-alpha.82c23a65"

I'm guessing giving it a version 1.0.0-beta.1.pre before doing a canary release would be a decent workaround (giving a final output of 1.0.0-beta.1.pre-alpha.82c23a65)

[KyleAMathews]

yeah that makes sense. Though... the sorting is still correct by tag — if you install gatsby@next you'll get 1.0.0-beta.2 not the canary. Right?

[rstacruz]

let me try that now.

[rstacruz]

yep, it seems so. as long as the next dist-tag is set correctly it should be good.

→  npm dist-tag ls gatsby
canary: 1.0.0-beta.1-alpha.82c23a65
latest: 0.12.48
next: 1.0.0-beta.2
test: 1.0.0-alpha9-test1
testing: 1.0.0-alpha-testing-7