Releases & Versioning

I’m delving into personal projects way more than before, and I started using Renovate extensively for keeping my dependencies up to date. It saves tons of time and effort to deal with this tedious task.

And man, do I get goosebumps every time a new Next.js release pops up?!

I’d expect it to be a walk in the park, and yet…

• amount of changes - Some releases contain just a few changes, but the “real ones” would make you cry. v15.5.0 contains 234 core changes, and 215 misc changes. Good luck there’s something that won’t affect you.

• canary piling / versioning - They mix canary releases along regular ones. It seems the team aims for “the next big release” right from the last of this kind, but they don’t bother with semver that much.

  So after v15.4.1, they started having v15.4.2-canary.1. Which does not mean the next “official” release would be v15.4.2, oh no, it turned out to be v15.5.0!

• backporting - Meanwhile, they make other releases, I guess with important fixes. Something like “not quite a release, but still”. After v15.4.1 there’s v15.4.2 saying:

This release is backporting bug fixes. It does not include all pending features/changes on canary.

• no release notes - They didn’t configure any release notes properly, so you never know what you’re getting. You have to go to github and patiently read the 6 screen “summary” of what they did, most of the time without understanding a word because of internals.

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There’s nothing utterly complex here - people have figured it out ages ago. semver exists for a reason. Continuous delivery is blooming. Astro is shipping things in such a small and thoughtful way it’s a pleasure knowing things will work! Just check the confidence level of Renovate - even 28 days after a new Next.js release, it’s still “neutral”, while Astro’s are beaming green a few hours later!

I’m sure maintaining this monster is not an easy task. Yet, there are simple steps to improve DX tremendously, and I expect a company like that to tackle them.