releases.json Breaking Change

[richlander]

releases.json Breaking Change

releases.json is a family of files (and schema) that the .NET Team publishes to enable programatic access to the catalog of .NET releases.

We are making some targeted changes to these files, primarily to reduce user confusion, in response to consistent and broad feedback.

We are making three primary changes, ordered from most to least breaking:

• Replace the lts and current value with active, in the support-phase property.
• Replace the rc value with go-live in the in the support-phase property.
• Document the allowable values for support-phase.
• Add a new release-type property, with immutable values of lts or sts, as appropriate. standard stands for Standard Support and replaces the Current terminology to describe a release.

Timing

The change will be made in two phases:

• The release-type property will be added via Add new release labels #7499.
• The support-phase property for .NET 7 will transition from rc to active on November 8th. Previously, this would have been current.

Context

"Current" releases will now be referred to as "Standard Term Support" releases, in obvious contrast to "Long Term Support (LTS)" releases. The duration of the support periods and related policies are not changing.

The "Current" term will no longer be used.

See .NET Release Labels for more information.

[terrajobst]

I like it. I also really like the new release label naming.

Quick question regarding process and nomenclature: The second and third bullet aren't really breaking changes in the schema though, right? For APIs we generally don't consider adding new members a breaking change; returning different values for existing data would be, which is what I think the first bullet means.

[svick]

• The support-phases property for .NET 7 will transition from go-live to sts on November 8th.

This should be support-phase, singular, right?

[richlander]

support-phases

Oops. Fixed. Good catch!

breaking change

100% agree. The first two changes are breaking (to different degrees). The last one is benign.

[WeihanLi]

// go-live means rc? why don't we just use rc or ReleaseCandidate instead

edited

Finding that go-live may not be a rc release from https://github.com/dotnet/designs/blob/release-labels/accepted/2022/dotnet-release-labels.md#proposed-labels

[richlander]

Not really.

go-live is a support level. Microsoft can apply go-live to Preview 1 if it decides. It currently exclusively applies it to RCs, as you suggest. That could change in future.

I thought about switching preview to pre-release to make this clearer. That would have resulted in pre-release and go-live. I decided that adding another term was confusing and overly academic. I decided that the proposed scheme was a good middle ground.

[mairaw]

Should we pin this issue? Thanks for providing the timing of the changes. It helps us to plan the website changes.

[mairaw]

Updated issue with the latest guidance

[leecow]

Hey folks,

These changes have been published. You should see them live on dot.net and public endpoints for releases.json files shortly.

[mairaw]

Should we close this one @richlander?

[richlander]

This happened a long time ago.