Publishing a Breaking Change¶

If your updates will cause previous installs of the geocoder to fail to work, (For example, a major change to how the powershell script interfaces with the backend), you will need to create a release as mentioned above and update powershell/min_exe_version.txt to match the version in the change. This will prevent the user from being able to run the executable if their version is older than the breaking change.

To publish a breaking change:

1. Update powershell/min_exe_version.txt to the latest semver number. The format is v2.0.0. In the future, we plan to remove the 'v' from the string.
2. Update powershell/geocoder_for_exe.ps1 so that $exeVersion variable matches the latest semver number
3. Please flag in any PR that you have created a breaking change, and have a second person review.
4. Once merged, create a release and push to main with the latest semver number

The check works as follows:

1. The exe should pull the most recent code on main, which will pull the latest copy of min_exe_version.txt.
2. The exe will check the executable version in the file against powershell/min_exe_version.txt. You must update the $exeVersion variable in the powershell file for this to work. This check works by stripping the "v" from the semver string, and then using powershell's [System.Version] to compare versions.
3. If the executable version is too low, the script will give the user an error and exit.