Unstable versioning and distribution structure

[odisseus]

trafficstars

Over the past releases, the version name of this rule set has changed from semver (0.0.2) to non-standard (tut) to date derived (20220201) to semver-like with a prefix (v5.0.0). The packaging format has changed from .zip to .tar.gz, and the relationship between the version number, release tag, and strip_prefix has been changing as well.

At bazel-steward, we try to automate dependency updates for Bazel, in a similar way like Dependabot does it for NPM and other package managers. Such erratic version naming causes a great inconvenience to us.

Are there any plans to settle on a single pattern of version names?

[liucijus]

@odisseus we haven't had proper releases for a long time - users fetched revision based archives. Since #1452 we started releasing Rules Scala. All new releases will be prefixed with v and start since v5.x.x, where 5 means minimal Bazel version required for the ruleset. If you have suggestions, wishes let's hear about them. Also, if bazel-steward has some version requirements, I would be happy if you could contribute a doc about it - so we won't break it in the future.