Non-plain-text block description is being deprecated in WordPress 6.2

[anomiex]

Impacted plugin

Jetpack

Steps to Reproduce

1. Run Jetpack (or its extension tests) with a version of WordPress or the Gutenberg plugin that provides @wordpress/blocks 11.18.0 or later.
2. See deprecation warnings.

Affected blocks are recurring-payments, subscriptions, simple-payments, and wordads.

A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

No deprecation warnings.

What actually happened

"Declaring non-string block descriptions is deprecated since version 6.2."

Browser

No response

Other information

No response

Platform (Simple, Atomic, or both?)

Simple, Atomic, Self-hosted

Reproducibility

Consistent

Severity

No response

Available workarounds?

No but the platform is still usable

Workaround details

No response

[kraftbj]

Asked on the Gutenberg PR what's the preferred way to pass a link into a description WordPress/gutenberg#44455 (comment)

[jeherve]

I've been looking into this, and I'm not sure what's the best approach we could take.

Remove the existing custom description

This would be the nuclear option. We would lose a lot of data for each block; we do use custom descriptions with multiple paragraphs and external links in at least 9 blocks in Jetpack at the moment. See #29757 for implementation.

Add a new panel to each block

We could manually add InspectorControls with a PanelBody to each one of the blocks where we have a custom description with a link, but this would separate our custom description from the default description.

We could extract this to Jetpack's registerJetpackBlock, by using the editor.BlockEdit filter to add a custom InspectorControls with a custom description to each block where a custom description was passed when registering the block.

However, this doesn't solve the above problem. More importantly, we do not have any control over the order of the panels in the sidebar, so our custom description may end up at the bottom of the sidebar, below other settings:

#29402 is one example of that.

Use a SlotFill

This would be nice, but there is no existing SlotFill in a location that wouldn't be completely separated from the default description. This is what was suggested in WordPress/gutenberg#44455 (comment)

---

@mtias Would you have any recommendations on this?

[jeherve]

Use a SlotFill

I created an issue in the Gutenberg repo to try to revive that conversation: WordPress/gutenberg#49887