Release 3.x meta/discussion

[coilysiren]

This is a meta-issue meant to track the work in other issues targeting the Release 3.x milestone.

benevolent takeover notes

Hiii I'm working on getting many maintenance tasks addressed including
taking over this issue from @coilysiren 🙇🏼 who is busy with other life adventures ❤️ ~ @meatballhat

I know 2.0 isn't out yet 🙂 (see #826) but I wanted to create a tracking issue for the 3.x series.

Here's some breaking/difficult changes we want to consider for V3:

• Cleanup redundant code in App/Command #1498
• Fix: Help name consistency among app/commands and subcommands #1489
• Replace code generation with generics where possible/maintainable (First cut at using generics for base flag types #1512 )
• merge altsrc with main package #1058
• Move man page compatibility to separate package #1055
• Add testify, and update tests to use it rather than expect #1695
• Improve testability of *cli.Context (via Release 3.x meta/discussion #833 (comment)) (conflicts with Consolidate all Context code into Command #1587)
• remove EnableBashCompletion in favor of CompletionShells
• consider a different release method (eg. not just merging to master) via Support users who are using GOPATH mode #952 (comment) (this was changed in v2)
• make flags "global" by default, to some degree (this was added into v2)
• Compiled metadata is not used #753
• Add optional check for duplicated string and int type flags. #1071
• Cleanup error handling. Make multiError implement ExitCoder
• Add integration with golangci-lint #1663
• Strictly limit default dependencies to stdlib #1890 ¹
• Ensure all exported structs are usable as "zero value" #1775
• Minimize top-level API surface area for both usability clarity and maintenance reduction #1531
• Build out all of the v3 documentation #1891

Please suggest more! I'll add them to this OP

Update ~January 2023: Progress! And yet, yeah, wish lists balanced with releasing usable software is hard to do. If you're the kind of human who finds themselves reading this, there's a v3.0.0-alpha2 tag now, which should play nicely with go get github.com/urfave/cli/v3@latest. Feedback wanted! ❤️ ~ @meatballhat

Footnotes

1. The documentation-related code that depends on github.com/russross/blackfriday/v2 and github.com/cpuguy83/go-md2man/v2 has been shown to add significant bulk to compiled outputs ↩

[saschagrunert]

Regarding the API we could split it up into an internal and external one. Everything which should not be imported externally would go into the internal folder.

[saschagrunert]

I would love to see fish shell completion support. 💚

[coilysiren]

Regarding the API we could split it up into an internal and external one. Everything which should not be imported externally would go into the internal folder.

I'm a big fan of tossing tons of code into internal, its a really cool pattern

[coilysiren]

I would love to see fish shell completion support.

For anyone else reading, here's a ticket for that => #351

[coilysiren]

Oh! I see now that we call the flag EnableBashCompletion instead of CompletionShells. I'll add this to the OP 👍

[marwan-at-work]

Since v2 was never officially released, it might be okay to make minimal breaking changes to the v2 branch before merging and releasing it?

I'm happy either way, but if that's more convenient then it should be okay since people know that v2 has not been released yet and so it's okay to make some breaking changes before its officially stable