Hello, I have a collection I maintain that has a decent number of downloads. I have heard from a number of people that it's very useful but of course I don't know how many total there are. Either way, how do I notify current users that upgrading to a new version may break some things? If somebody never looks at the NPM or web-based Node-RED flows directory, that means they won't see the .MD file where I normally list out changes. Is there a way to drop a note that will appear next to the upgrade available note in the palette editor? Any way to warn people BEFORE they upgrade?
I do know how to generate a standard notification in the editor AFTER the upgrade but that is too late.
As mentioned by Colin, bump the Major for breaking changes and adhere to Semantic Versioning.
Other ways to warn of breaking changes includes:
Putting a Sticky on your repo
Use these forums (Share your Nodes)
Sometimes it's also good to create a migration document, to help users migrate to the latest Major, I do this with my projects.
Another path, is to deprecate the area that is going to change, in a Minor update (allowing you to pre-warn users with a notification), I have corporate users, so often have to create a 'halfway house' release so to speak - given them time to make the required changes.
Honestly, as long as you follow best practices, you really can't baby users.
And you can never have enough documentation. So making sure you update a comprehensive CHANGELOG. And to Marcus's point, you can include future breaking change warnings in there as well.
Hey, thanks for all the feedback. I guess the final answer is "no". I know some users of my collections are not necessarily programmer types and the concept of "major semver" is probably lost on them. I've also found that most of them do not participate in these forums.
I do see that a link to the Flows page is available next to the new version notification so I'll just hope they do that first as I have included the warnings in the MD file contents.
