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Upgrading dependencies is essential for maintaining security and compatibility. The specific level of effort varies from library to library, but there are several steps that should be followed for all dependency upgrades.
Standard Steps
Projects follow various versioning strategies, which often complicates the upgrade process. Understanding project versioning strategy is important when evaluating changes.
- Evaluate project versioning strategy
- Review project release notes
- Determine level of changes
- Review direct dependency references
- Review transitive dependency references
- Run local build
- Run GitHub automated builds in forked repository
Evaluate Project Versioning Strategy
Projects follow various versioning strategies, which often complicates the upgrade process. Understanding project versioning strategy is important when evaluating changes.
Many projects adhere to Semantic Versioning for project releases. Semantic Versioning aims to provide a common approach to version number numbering in a way that communicates the type of changes included. Major versions can include some number of breaking changes, whereas minor and patch versions should never include breaking changes.
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