External Package Maintenance

Versioning Packages

Bumping versions

Dart packages have two varieties of versioning schemes. We use semver with a variation that the numbers are shifted to the right if the package is not stable enough to reach a 1.0.0 release. Note that the Dart team culture was previously to keep packages at 0.x for a long time, whereas now we prefer to publish 1.0.0 as soon as feasible to avoid confusion over these patterns.

• For packages that are not yet stable: 0.major.minor+patch.
• For most packages: major.minor.patch.

Never include a +1 on a version if the first number is not 0. For breaking changes, bump the major version. For new features, including all non-breaking API changes like introducing a new class, bump the minor version. For bug fixes, documentation changes, or any other change which doesn't impact calling code, bump the patch version.

Making a change

Any time the code in the repo does not match exactly the code of a version published on pub, both the pubspec.yaml and CHANGELOG.md should include a -wip version. We bump the version on the first change after a publish, even if we don't plan on publishing the code in that state or if the change doesn't impact consumers.

When opening a PR, check if the pubspec and CHANGELOG already have a -wip version listed. If there is already a version, check what variety of version bump it is from the previous published version and compare to the type for the change you are making. If necessary you can "upgrade" the version change, for instance if the current -wip version is a patch number higher than what is published, and you are adding a feature, rewrite the version into a minor version change from what is published.

If the version is not currently a -wip, perform the appropriate version bump and add a -wip. Add a section in the CHANGELOG to match. Include the -wip suffix in both places to avoid potential confusion about what versions are published. If the change has no external impact (for instance a safe refactoring or lint cleanup) it is OK to leave the CHANGELOG section empty. If the change has external impact add an entry to the section for that version.

Making breaking version bumps

Whenever you have the occasion to make a breaking version change, check if there are other minor breaking changes that should come with it.

• Search the issue tracker for potential breaking changes. Hopefully these are tagged with next-breaking-release.
• Search the code for @deprecated members and remove them.

In most packages a breaking version bump should be rare. Before making a breaking change you should weight many factors against the value provided by the change. Some of these factors include:

How many packages depend on this package?

All of these packages will have to release a new version, and possibly make changes if they were actually broken by the changes.

Will this change cause downstream breaking changes in other packages?

Be very careful about changes like this - as they can have much larger cascading effects.

Example: Changing a sync API to be async. This could cause other packages to change their APIs to also be async, so they also have to do a breaking change.

Does this change break any internal projects?

Anything which could break internal projects is potentially much more difficult to roll out. The entire internal codebase typically has to be migrated at once at the same time as the roll.

This can cause cascading issues in rolling all the packages that depend on your package internally, so it is important to take this consideration seriously.

For this reason it is recommended that any potentially breaking change be ran through an internal presubmit before publishing externally.

This can also be mitigated by rolling out the breaking change in an incremental way, where both the new behavior can be opted into and the old is the default for some period of time. This allows internal code to be migrated one project at a time and then the old behavior can be removed once everything is migrated.

Publishing a package

• Always sync the package into google3 before publishing so that it can be validated against a larger corpus of code. If the package rolls with SDK it should be updated in DEPS and published only after the next successful SDK roll.
• Open a PR which removes the trailing -wip from the version in both the pubspec and the changelog. It is OK to do this in the same PR as another change if that change should be published immediately.
• pub publish. Don't ignore any warnings or errors reported by pub unless you are completely confident they are safe to ignore.
• Add a git tag with the version that was published (e.g., git tag v1.2.3). Check other tags in the repo to decide whether to include a leading v in the tag (git tag or git tag -l). New repositories should prefer to include the v. In a mono repo, start the tag with the name of the package. For example build_runner-v1.7.0. Be sure to git push --tags after adding a tag. Note that you can tag a specific commit - instead of just tagging head - with git tag v1.2.3 <commit-hash>.

Handling pull requests

• Pull requests should usually have a 1:1 correspondence with final commits. Use "Squash and merge" after a review.
• Once a pull request is sent for review, commits on that branch should be considered shared history. Never force push to a branch with an open pull request. Prefer to merge into that branch to resolve conflicts, prefer not to rebase.
  • Comments are tied to commits, so force pushing also destroys comment history in github prs.
  • Pushing a new commit with code review updates makes it easy to review changes since your last review, by looking at the new commits only.
• Add comments from the "Files changed" view, even as the PR author, so that they can sent in a batch rather than replying to each one by one on the "Conversation" view.
• The gh cli tool makes it easy to checkout a PR in cases where a change may be easer to understand in an IDE.