BREAKING_CHANGES.md

v6.0.0

Platforms

• Drop support for .NET Framework 4.8, .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5.0. Changed the project targets to .NET 6.0 or later.

Caching

• Refactor caching system in GitVersion to use json files instead of yaml files. This change is not backwards compatible with the old caching system.

Configuration changes:

• The configuration properties continuous-delivery-fallback-tag, tag-number-pattern, and tag were renamed to continuous-delivery-fallback-label, label-number-pattern, and label respectively. tag-pre-release-weight and tag-prefix remained as they were as they are referring to a Git tag.

• When using a commit message that matches both *-version-bump-message and no-bump-message, there is no increment for that commit. In other words, no-bump-message now takes precedence over *-version-bump-message.

• The fallback version strategy now returns 0.0.0 and is flagged with ShouldIncrement equal to true. This yields the version 0.1.0 on the develop branch (IncrementStrategy.Minor by default) and 0.0.1 on the main branch (IncremetnStrategy.Patch by default).

• The current branch (child) inherits its configuration from the source (parent) branch if the increment strategy is set to Inherit. This makes branch configuration recursive, simpler, more intuitive, more flexible, and more robust.

• Instead of having a single effective configuration, we now have one effective configuration per branch where the increment strategy is not set to inherit.

• The new implementation of the branch configuration inheritance affects per default only the pull-requests, hotfix and feature branches. In this case the next version will be generated like the child branch is not existing and the commits have been made on the source branch.

  • The following example illustrates this behavior. On the feature branch the semantic version 1.1.0-just-a-test.1+2 will now be generated instead of version 1.0.0-just-a-test.1+3 previously:

    * 1f1cfb4 52 minutes ago  (HEAD -> feature/just-a-test)
    * 1f9654d 54 minutes ago  (release/1.1.0)
    * be72411 56 minutes ago  (develop)
    * 14800ff 58 minutes ago  (tag: 1.0.0, main)
    

• A new unknown branch magic string has been introduced to give the user the possibility to specify the branch configuration for a branch which is not known. A branch is not known if only the regular expression of the branch configuration with the name unknown is matching. Please notice that this branch configuration behaves like any other branch configurations.

• Additional fallback branch configuration properties have been introduced at the root to define base properties which will be inherit to the branch configurations. That means if no other branch configuration in the inheritance line defines the given property the fallback property applies. Notice that the inheritance tree can be controlled using the increment strategy property in the branch configuration section.

  • The following example illustrates this behavior. The hotfix branch configuration overrides the main branch configuration and the result overrides the fallback branch configuration.

    * 1f1cfb4 52 minutes ago  (HEAD -> hotfix/just-a-test)
    * 14800ff 58 minutes ago  (tag: 1.0.0, main)
    

• When overriding the configuration with e.g. GitVersion.yaml the software distinguishes between properties who are not existent and properties who are null. This is especially important if the user wants to define branch related configuration which are marked with increment strategy Inherit.

• Following root configuration properties have been removed:

  • continuous-delivery-fallback-tag

• A new branch related property with name track-merge-message has been introduced. Consider we have a main branch and a release/1.0.0 branch and merge changes from release/1.0.0 to the main branch. In this scenario the merge message will be interpreted as a next version 1.0.0 when track-merge-message is set to true otherwise 0.0.1.

• The pre-release tags are only considered when they are matching with the label name of the branch. This has an effect on the way how the CommitCountSource will be determined.

• The process of increasing the version with bump message when CommitMessageIncrementing is enabled and increment strategy is None has been changed.

• A new configuration property with name version-in-branch-pattern has been introduced. This setting only applies on branches where the option is-release-branch is set to true. Please notice that the branch name needs to be defined after the version number by default (instead of support/lts-2.0.0 please name the branch like support/2.0.0-lts).

• The is-release-branch property of the hotfix branch setting has been changed from false to true. If present the hotfix number will be considered now by default.

• In the GitHub and the Git Flow workflows the label property is by default set to an empty string on the main branch. This yields to a pre-release version on main with an empty tag. Instead of for instance 1.0.1+46 GitVersion generates the full semantic version 1.0.1-46 instead. This behavior can be changed to generate only stable versions (no pre-release version) with setting the label to null (Please keep in mind that the label property on root needs to be set to null as well, otherwise the fallback applies). This change is caused by issue #2347.

• The useBranchName magic string has been removed. Instead use {BranchName} for label.

• The BranchPrefixToTrim configuration property has been removed. RegularExpression is now used to capture named groups instead.

  • Default RegularExpression for feature branches is changed from ^features?[/-] to ^features?[/-](?<BranchName>.+) to support using {BranchName} out-of-the-box
  • Default RegularExpression for unknown branches is changed from .* to (?<BranchName>.+) to support using {BranchName} out-of-the-box

• The Mainline mode and the related implementation has been removed completely. The new Mainline version strategy should be used instead.

• The Mainline version strategy doesn't support downgrading the increment for calculating the next version. This is the case if e.g. a bump messages has been defined which is lower than the branch increment.

• The branch related property is-mainline in the configuration system has been renamed to is-main-branch

• The versioning mode has been renamed to deployment mode and consists of following values:

  • ManualDeployment (previously ContinuousDelivery)
  • ContinuousDelivery (previously ContinuousDeployment)
  • ContinuousDeployment (new)

• At the configuration root level, a new array called strategies has been introduced, which can consist of on or more following values:

  • ConfiguredNextVersion
  • MergeMessage
  • TaggedCommit
  • TrackReleaseBranches
  • VersionInBranchName
  • Mainline

• The initialization wizard has been removed.

• On the develop, release and hotfix branch the introduced branch related property prevent-increment.when-current-commit-tagged has been set to false to get the incremented instead of the tagged semantic version.

• When setting the "ignore commits before" parameter to a future value, an exception will occur if no commits are found on the current branch. This behavior mimics that of an empty repository.

• On the GitFlow workflow the increment property has been changed:

  • in branch release from None to Minor and
  • in branch hotfix from None to Patch

• On the GitHubFlow workflow the increment property has been changed in branch release from None to Patch.

• When creating a branch with name hotfix/next (by using the GitFlow workflow) or release/next (by the GitHubFlow workflow) the resulting version will yield to a patched version per default.

• If you have a tag 1.0.0 on main and branch from main to release/1.0.1 then the next version number will be 1.1.0 when using the GitFlow workflow. This behavior is expected (but different compared to the GitHubFlow workflow) because on the GitFlow workflow you have an addition branch configuration with name hotfix where is-release-branch is set to true. That means if you want 1.0.1 as a next version you need to branch to hotfix/1.0.1 or hotfix/next. On the other hand if you use the GitHubFlow workflow the next version number will be 1.0.1 because the increment on the release branch is set to Patch.

v5.0.0

• Version numbers in branches other than release branches are no longer considered as a version source by default. Implemented in #1541.
• #1581 folds GitTools.Core back into GitVersion to make maintaining GitVersion easier.

v4.0.0

Git Flow Changes

When using GitFlow, a few things have changed. Hopefully the new settings just work for you

• develop has pre-release tag of alpha now, not unstable.
• develop will bump as soon as a release branch is created.
• Look at the GitFlow examples for details of how it works now.

Configuration Changes

• GitVersionConfig.yaml is deprecated in favor of GitVersion.yml.
• Regular expressions are no longer used as keys in branch config
  • We have named branches, and introduced a regex config which you can override.
  • The default keys are: master, develop, feature, release, pull-request, hotfix and support
  • Just run GitVersion.exe in your project directory and it will tell you what to change your config keys to
  • For example, dev(elop)?(ment)?$ is now just develop, we suggest not overring regular expressions unless you really want to use a different convention.
• source-branches added as a configuration option for branches, it helps GitVersion pick the correct source branch

v3.0.0

• NextVersion.txt has been deprecated, only GitVersionConfig.yaml is supported
• AssemblyFileSemVer variable removed, AssemblyVersioningScheme configuration value makes this variable obsolete
• Variables ClassicVersion and ClassicVersionWithTag removed
• MSBuild task arguments (AssemblyVersioningScheme, DevelopBranchTag, ReleaseBranchTag, TagPrefix, NextVersion) have been removed, use GitVersionConfig.yaml instead
• GitVersionTask's ReleaseDateAttribute no longer exists