Support monorepos by coercing version strings

[Adam Coster]

The updater currenty relies on semver.valid to determine whether incoming version strings are valid. It does this for the parsed URL as well as the tags from GitHub releases.

Monorepos have to uses more complex tag prefixes, since they can contain many projects that each have a different version. The typical format is package-name@0.1.2.

If the updater were to clean putative version strings with semver.coerce, that would solve this problem.

It looks like that would be an easy update -- if the feature is wanted I can make a PR!

[Charles Kerr]

We added semver.valid checks in d4c005f to fix #61 and in 3374b50 to fix #45.

I'd like another opinion from maintainers more active in this repo than me; but from a quick read of d4c005f, it looks to me like semver.coerce would still work for those use cases.

Also CC @juliangruber for opinion as he wrote both of those patches! 😸

[Julian Gruber]

+1 to using semver.coerce, as long as it doesn't product false positives, where a release that shouldn't be considered is selected.

[Adam Coster]

semver.coerce is pretty aggressive about trying to get a semver string out of something. Probably too aggressive.

An alternative would be a custom semver-cleaning function that grabs the first actually-valid semver substring out of a larger string:

/**
 * @param {string} version_string
 * @returns {string|null}
 */
function find_semver_substring(version_string) {
  if (!version_string || typeof version_string !== 'string') {
    return false;
  }
  let version = semver.valid(version_string);
  if (version) {
    return version;
  }
  // Else grab the first substring that looks like a semver
  // Adapted from https://semver.org/#is-there-a-suggested-regular-expression-regex-to-check-a-semver-string
  version =
    /(?<major>0|[1-9]\d*)\.(?<minor>0|[1-9]\d*)\.(?<patch>0|[1-9]\d*)(?:-(?<prerelease>(?:0|[1-9]\d*|\d*[a-zA-Z-][0-9a-zA-Z-]*)(?:\.(?:0|[1-9]\d*|\d*[a-zA-Z-][0-9a-zA-Z-]*))*))?(?:\+(?<buildmetadata>[0-9a-zA-Z-]+(?:\.[0-9a-zA-Z-]+)*))?/.exec(
      version_string,
    )?.[0];
  return version ?? null;
}

That regex is from the official semver docs, with the leading ^ and trailing $ removed (so it'll match substrings) and switch from Perl capture-group naming to JavaScript.

If it doesn't make sense to capture build strings that part of the regex could be removed, or run the final result through semver.valid for consistency.

Some examples, where each field is the string passed into semver's valid, clean, or coerced methods, or the above "custom" function:

{
  "v10.0.3": {
    "valid": "10.0.3",
    "clean": "10.0.3",
    "coerced": "10.0.3",
    "custom": "10.0.3"
  },
  "0.0.11": {
    "valid": "0.0.11",
    "clean": "0.0.11",
    "coerced": "0.0.11",
    "custom": "0.0.11"
  },
  "0.0.11-rc": {
    "valid": "0.0.11-rc",        
    "clean": "0.0.11-rc",        
    "coerced": "0.0.11",
    "custom": "0.0.11-rc"        
  },
  "monorepo@v2.3.4-rc.0.10": {   
    "valid": null,
    "clean": null,
    "coerced": "2.3.4",
    "custom": "2.3.4-rc.0.10"    
  },
  "monorepo2.3": {
    "valid": null,
    "clean": null,
    "coerced": "2.3.0",
    "custom": null
  },
  "1.2.3-rc": {
    "valid": "1.2.3-rc",
    "clean": "1.2.3-rc",
    "coerced": "1.2.3",
    "custom": "1.2.3-rc"
  },
  "hello world 1": {
    "valid": null,
    "clean": null,
    "coerced": "1.0.0",
    "custom": null
  }
}

[Charles Kerr]

Looks like there's consensus on coerce, so @adam-coster feel free to make the PR you suggested 👍