What would be the versioning style during Alpha period

[RafaelGSS]

As discussed in Today's release meeting, since we have the possibility of including semver-major during the alpha period, releasing it as v27.0.0 wouldn't make sense since v27.1.0 could include semver-majors on it.

I propose v27.0.0-alpha-0, v27.0.0-alpha-1, ..., v27.0.0 (stable/LTS)

cc: @nodejs/release

[aduh95]

I've suggested in #1142 (comment) 27.0.0-alpha.0.0.0, so it's still possible to know the semverness of a given release compared to another one.

[trivikr]

The official suggested regular expression at semver is

^(?P<major>0|[1-9]\d*)\.(?P<minor>0|[1-9]\d*)\.(?P<patch>0|[1-9]\d*)(?:-(?P<prerelease>(?:0|[1-9]\d*|\d*[a-zA-Z-][0-9a-zA-Z-]*)(?:\.(?:0|[1-9]\d*|\d*[a-zA-Z-][0-9a-zA-Z-]*))*))?(?:\+(?P<buildmetadata>[0-9a-zA-Z-]+(?:\.[0-9a-zA-Z-]+)*))?$

Playground: https://regex101.com/r/Ly7O1x/3/

While both v27.0.0-alpha-0 and 27.0.0-alpha.0.0.0 fit the regular expression, as a user of Node.js and userland modules I expect it to be v27.0.0-alpha.0.

Examples of other software following v<major>.<minor>.<patch>-<prerelease>.<num>:

• Current Node.js rc versions: https://nodejs.org/download/rc/
• chalk (403M weekly downloads) https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk?activeTab=versions
• ms (422M weekly downloads) https://www.npmjs.com/package/ms?activeTab=versions
• typescript (182M weekly downloads) https://www.npmjs.com/package/typescript?activeTab=versions
• lodash (143M weekly downloads) https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash?activeTab=versions
• react (141M weekly downloads) https://www.npmjs.com/package/react?activeTab=versions

Alternatives that I came across while checking versions in JS ecosystem

• 27.0.0-0: This would be short to read, but can get confused with stable version. We should keep prerelease tag.
• 27.0.0-alpha.YYYYMMDD: TypeScript follows this for their dev prerelease versions. I personally like this because it's a good mix of semver with calendar versioning. But it's too long to read.

[MikeMcC399]

Please finalize this decision.

nodejs/node#63135 is still open.

I'm not too concerned with the final format, so long as it's SemVer compliant, however in order to start preparing in docker-node, it would be good to be using test data that corresponds to whatever is planned.

There are other questions to be answered, such as possible changes to https://nodejs.org/dist/ and conventions on the use of floating tags. See also #1171.

[aduh95]

With nodejs/node#63135 ready to land landed, it's safe to say that 27.0.0-alpha.0.0.0 will be the first Alpha release of Node.js 27

[MikeMcC399]

With nodejs/node#63135 ready to land landed, it's safe to say that 27.0.0-alpha.0.0.0 will be the first Alpha release of Node.js 27

It seems that this question has been answered then and the issue could be closed.