v3.5.0 release plan

[yzhang-gh]

These work items are blocking the release.

Must resolve

• TOC visible text (link text) generation, especially when facing non-CommonMark syntax. 🐛 Fix TOC visible text and GitHub slug generation #890, LaTeX is not preserved in TOC text #903
• Toggle math bug: Block quote is not respected #907
• A mysterious bug in decoration of code span in task list.
• v3.5.0 welcome message
• Mention incompatibility with vscode-math
• VS Code now supports syntax highlight of strikethrough by itself Markdown syntax highlighting for ~~text with strikethrough~~ and task-items microsoft/vscode#43504.

Can defer

• Implementation of welcome message and NLS. 🐛 Rewrite localization & welcome #885
  • Investigate JSON module and webpack HMR.
• Full support for Virtual Workspaces. Support virtual workspaces #948
• Design configuration schema. Add print.enableCheckBoxes config option #962
• Command enablement. Command 'markdown.extension.toc.create' not found on certain file associations #975
• Review different kinds of Markdown table.

[Lemmingh]

FYI

CommonMark 0.30 got released a few minutes ago, with mainly clarifications, and subtle changes to boundary conditions.

I think it will not affect our plan for now.

[yzhang-gh]

I was wondering whether we should plan a patch release v3.4.1 (given that I won't have enough time in the next two months).

We can create a new branch and cherry-pick some of the fixes that are not entangled with the architecture changes.

[Lemmingh]

Yeah. #903 has blocked us for nearly one year.

We now have 56 commits since v3.4.0 (c50fe84), most of which are mild. Cherry-pick might be too heavy. Instead, we can just revert a few dangerous changes on a new branch. I'll investigate further and give you an answer this weekend.

[yzhang-gh]

That will be super helpful. Don't hurry and please take your time.

[Lemmingh]

Only two appear troublesome.

• Toggle math bug: Block quote is not respected #907

  I think 575b443 neither fixed it nor added anything significant. So we can pretend nothing happened, and move it to the next iteration.

• LaTeX is not preserved in TOC text #903

  I cannot come up with an "ideal solution" that caters to everyone without security risk. Perhaps we can let $ (dollar sign) pass for now, and continue the discussion.

How do you like the plan?

[yzhang-gh]

Looks good to me 👍 as long as we are not introducing breaking changes (in a patch release).

[Lemmingh]

I'll comment here when finishing my part.

[yzhang-gh]

@Lemmingh I have created a patch branch and released v3.4.2. (It has been more than a year since the last update.)

Apparently now there is no easy way to merge the two branches (patch and master). I have tested locally that rebasing master on the patch is okay (the history is kept linear and the duplicated commits are auto eliminated), while we only need to manually deal with conflicts on package(-lock).json. The drawback is it will affect your local branches (need a merge commit).

Or you may have some better ideas?

[Lemmingh]

ideas?

Tag and keep it forever.

It's a common pattern in large projects to create a branch for each x.y release. As part of maintenance, critical changes in the main branch will be backported as x.y.z patches.

I guess we didn't have such practice because we deprecate old releases as soon as a new version comes out. It sounds not a conflict to me to make release-branches occasionally and have a forward-only life cycle policy meanwhile.

[yzhang-gh]

Makes sense. Then I am going to simply cherry-pick the "version number and changelog commit" into the master branch.

[Lemmingh]

Not sure if I understand you. Do you refer to CHANGELOG.md?

[yzhang-gh]

Yes (and also the version in package.json)

[Lemmingh]

I guess we can bump the version of master to 3.5.0, and copy the CHANGELOG.md. Just need to clarify its source in the commit message.

It sounds strange to have a version number that actually doesn't reflect the content.

---

I thought about:

📝 Update CHANGELOG

From f791314074e92503249b1688c4fa97e28d8272ac

🔧 Bump version to 3.5.0