📌 Mocha 11 Release Plan

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Edit (December 2nd, 2024): mocha@11.0.1 is released as latest on npm.

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We're working on a new major version of Mocha! 📦

Mocha 11 will be the first new major version of Mocha in 3 years. It will contain no new bug fixes or features compared to v10. The only user-facing changes in Mocha 11 will be:

• 🚀 Feature: Update glob from 8.1.0 which is no longer supported #5148
• 🧹 Versioning: Bump minimum Node.js version from 14.0.0 to 18.18.0 #5206

Our plan is to:

• Monday, November 11th: release a "pre-release" version of Mocha 11 today to npm (not as stable)
  • mocha@11.0.0 is published as mocha@next on npm 👍
• Wait a few business days to merge the two PRs, then >=1 business day after
• Release Mocha 11 as stable on npm

As mentioned in #5027, we're a new volunteer maintenance team and want to tread carefully with breaking changes to Mocha. We're holding off an adding any additional breaking changes until the next major version, Mocha 12, which we will not release until some time in 2025 at the earliest. We'll first learn see how the Mocha 11 release goes and learn from it. As careful as we are planning on being with Mocha 11, there is always some risk with publishing a new major version of a project. Mocha is depended upon by thousands upon thousands of consuming projects, many of which are not open source or built in ways we're familiar with as a team.

Alternating major versions between ones that purely raise engine targets and ones that add breaking feature changes is a strategy used by some other ecosystem projects, such as typescript-eslint.

👉 In the meantime, we're also working on a new docs site at https://mocha-docs-next.netlify.app.

[mark-wiemer]

It will contain no new bug fixes or features compared to the 11.

Sorry, what exactly does this mean?

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Whoops, that should say "to 10". Fixed. Thanks :)

[jftanner]

Wait a few business days to merge the two PRs

How're you feeling about merging #5148? It'd be nice to be able to kick the tires on mocha@next for a few days before a lot of US folk are away for the Thanksgiving week.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Feeling very good about it 😄. Merged!

mocha@11.0.0-beta is now published on npm under the mocha@next tag.

You raise a good point about Thanksgiving. I'm personally going to be out of commission for something like half the week. 🦃

My tentative plan (not run by @Uzlopak or @voxpelli, cc for input) is to release Mocha@11 as stable on Monday, December 2nd.

[kraenhansen]

For what it's worth, I upgraded mocha-remote to the v11.0.0 release and ran test without any issues 👍

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

mocha@11.0.1 is now published with the latest tag on npm. We're released! 🚀

[jftanner]

I've upgraded as well, and encountered no problems. Thanks!

[mark-wiemer]

@JoshuaKGoldberg sounds like we can close this one? ;) Congrats!

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Haha I was thinking of keeping it open a bit for visibility. But every notification that comes up on it does strike fear of breakages in me... let's say next week I'll close it unless some big breakage happens.