Roadmap for release?

[Falco20019]

2.0.0-beta4.22272.1 is out for over 2 years now. Could you please publish a non-pre-release? Our CI pipeline enforces NU5104 as error, which means that we can not use pre-releases outside of testing (as suggested by SemVer v2).

[k3davis]

This library appears to be "abandonware" - perhaps it was announced in some channel but it's interesting that the tool is integrated tightly into MS Docs and MS Learn but was never officially released, and the repository remains open.

I too wish they would publish a release build, any bugs in the current beta and all, even if it remains officially unsupported. This is a useful utility even in its current (apparently frozen) state.

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

@k3davis, I wouldn't call this library abandonware. It is heavily used in the dotnet program of .NET SDK, so I expect Microsoft will at least fix any security vulnerabilities that are exploitable in that context.

The version used in dotnet is a snapshot though, not the 2.0.0-beta4.22272.1 prerelease that they published to nuget.org two years ago.

On the main branch, it looks like the latest functionality change was #2289 in November 2023. All changes after that have been to the build system or to tests. The main-powderhouse branch is now supposed to be where development is done, but progress seems slow and it's not clear to me whether there's a plan for how to get the branch to releaseable shape.

[k3davis]

@KalleOlaviNiemitalo fair, and of course you're right it's still heavily in use (both by dotnet and presumably by the some of the millions of downloads of the last beta), but as a standalone consumer package it hasn't seen any updates in a couple of years and I didn't notice any repo activity suggesting that would change. Hopefully I am just being pessimistic. :)

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

In my opinion, they should just publish the main branch to nuget.org as 2.0.0 (not beta); it seems stable enough for dotnet. And if the powderhouse stuff ever becomes viable, then make that 3.0.0, with a different package name if required by a compatibility policy.

[Falco20019]

I would also assume to have this stuff just be 2.0 with anything additional being 3.0 at a later point. It's sadly just annoying that there is not even a single official release of this package for any version.

[ericbrunner]

@Falco20019 It's really wired that System.CommandLine is integrated in the official MS docs

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/commandline/

but since 2022 only a beta release is published. Thanks for pointing that out.

I continue with a more up to date package from https://www.nuget.org/packages/McMaster.Extensions.CommandLineUtils/

[alrz]

This is the version used in the sdk so not sure why it's abandoned like this for over two years. https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/80c7725dbf74c62eaed01aad668b5a52dedfc3b6/src/SourceBuild/content/eng/Versions.props#L30