Maintenance and traceability of the spec

As every document or recomendation it is sometimes really hard to maintain it considering number of the packages that will be included in the recomendations.

Packages can get:

• Outdated
• Deprecated
• Stopped from being maintained.
• No longer work with the rest of the ecosystem (Node.js version etc.)
• Go against some values and rules

To keep reference specifications maintainable we usually trying to automate some of this task (as recurently going thru the recomendations will be unrealistic and documentation will outdate/deprecate over time (been there).

Solution: Utilize already existing ecosystem of bots and list packages in the way that they can be seen in one place and automated.

Approach nr1

Each node.js package we recommending ending up in the root package.json. We configure dependabot, renovate, nsp and other IBM and Red Hat bots (Like license checks) to run on each PR and also on releases

Approach nr2

List packages in custom json file that have them categorized etc. then we can build some scripts for checking some metrics on those packages

I would think that initially we just need something like this:

{
  packages:{
     "express":{
		// To express categories
      	category: "REST API",
		// To express flavours
		labels: ["General Purpose", "Platform", "IOT"],
		// To losely define what version was checked or recomended
		version: ">=5.0.0",
		// To include some packages that we recommend that will work only with express.
		subpackages: ["express-session", "keycloak-connect"]
     }
  }
}

CC @mhdawson @lholmquist

[lholmquist]

@helio-frota @wtrocki sounds good to me. lets see how the integration goes

[wtrocki]

@helio-frota thank you so much for your reply. I would love to collaborate with you on this. I could not find oratrics. Will wait for @lholmquist reply. Happy to contribute - we need to move this one forward 😃