Please help test out pre-releases

[gabriel-samfira]

Hello everyone!

This module has grown quite a large community and many projects seem to depend on it. I would like to avoid, as much as humanly possible, breaking people's setups whenever we release a new version of this module. I know adding breaking changes causes pain and hours of debugging and it's something I would like to avoid in the future.

From now on, I will be releasing new versions, first as pre-releases on PowerShell Gallery, and after a reasonable delay (at least 1 week, but may be longer), release a stable version.

So, I need your help. I don't expect anyone to run pre-releases in production, but if you have a CI for your project, and your project has powershell-yaml as a dependency, please consider adding -AllowPrerelease in your Install-Module call. This will ensure you get the latest version (including pre-releases) and will help immensely in determining potential breaking changes.

That being said, not all breaking changes are bad. Some are justified, but it may require you to realign expectations of how powershell-yaml should behave. Catching a breaking change may mean us having to revert a change to powershell-yaml, but it may just give you a heads up of a change that must happen and which will mean you will need to make changes in the way you use powershell-yaml.

A recent example of a breaking change is the change that makes keys case sensitive when deserializing (reverted for now). The default behavior of PowerShell when it comes to deserializing YAML (or anything else that is case sensitive), is fundamentally broken because it leads to data loss if you have 2 (or more) keys with the same letters but different cases (eg: FOO vs foo).

I appreciate your time in helping us out to make powershell-yaml better for everyone. And I apologize if I broke your setup in the past with new version releases. I will try to keep that to a minimum.