Changelog is missing tags with almost-semver syntax

I am using v1.11.0.

I am generating the changelog for a project:

➜ auto-changelog
auto-changelog: 81 kB written to CHANGELOG.md

The changelog shows the following releases:

➜ grep "####" CHANGELOG.md | cut -d " " -f2 | cut -d "(" -f1 | head
[v0.52.1]
[v0.50.7]
[v0.50.6]
[v0.50.5]
[v0.50.4]
[v0.50.3]
[v0.50.2]
[v0.50.1]
[v0.49.8]
[v0.49.6]

However, some tags are completely missing:

➜ git tag --sort=v:refname | tail -r -n 10
v0.52.1
v0.52
v0.51
v0.50.7
v0.50.6
v0.50.5
v0.50.4
v0.50.3
v0.50.2
v0.50.1

I am completely missing v0.51 and v0.52. The tag exists, obviously:

➜ git show v0.51 | head
tag v0.51
Tagger: …
Date:   Mon Feb 18 12:37:53 2019 +0100

Tagging version 0.51

commit 98a186bcb9cd4ffcbd226535b8860f934c281aa7
Author: …
Date:   Mon Feb 18 12:37:53 2019 +0100

Any idea why these would be ignored by auto-changelog?

[cookpete]

I don’t think so, since semver.valid() will (my guess) return false for v0.52, since it (strictly) should be v0.52.0. So instead, it sorts by simply parsing the float values, which means v0.52 is “older” than v0.6

Apologies – just me not paying close enough attention.

That’s certainly possible, but it’d mean having to rewrite history and having all potential users prune old tags. Not saying that this is not possible, but it’s a bit of an inconvenience.

You don’t necessarily need to rewrite history. You could always add the correct semver tags at the same commits, then treat the incorrect tags as legacy/deprecated, and leave them for a certain amount of time before removing them?

I’m sure you could normalize the semver strings - ie, add the missing dot zeros - but that still wouldn’t handle anything additional but “partial semver versions"

I’m tempted to support this anyway as it seems to make sense. Given v0.50.7 and v0.51 you would expect it to be smart enough to know what came first.

[slhck]

You don’t necessarily need to rewrite history. You could always add the correct semver tags at the same commits, then treat the incorrect tags as legacy/deprecated, and leave them for a certain amount of time before removing them?

You’re right. That’d be a good alternative.

Thanks for considering supporting this additional format.

Maybe it could do that, but warn to stderr that nonstandard semver versions were found? That would help people catch this sooner.

That could be a possibility. Certainly I would’ve considered naming my tags differently had my changelog generation tool informed me (I was just using a rather simple script). Users should not be warned though if they use custom tag pattern.