Major version tagging

[mgerlach]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
It's a bit tedious with dependabot opening PRs for every patch for every action we use.

Describe the solution you'd like
With every release an according major version tag like "v3" should be put onto the release commit, like here https://github.com/actions/checkout/releases/tag/v3 . Users of the action can then refer to the latest minor/patch version of a major version by using @v3 rather than something like @v3.1.1

Describe alternatives you've considered

• We could use @main but that may be unstable
• We could use automerge, but we would like to limit that to our own internal dependencies and avoid automerging external ones where we do not know how well they are tested and whether versioning is truly semantic.

Additional context
n/a

[mgerlach]

Maybe something is broken. In the last release run (https://github.com/cycjimmy/semantic-release-action/actions/runs/3278377692/jobs/5396697624) It looks like a v3 tag was pushed, but it does not appear in https://github.com/cycjimmy/semantic-release-action/tags

[cycjimmy]

That's because it's pushed to the v3 branch and it won't appear in the tags list.
As in the example in the documentation, you can set cycjimmy/semantic-release-action@v3 to use the latest v3 version of the action.

Maybe something is broken. In the last release run (https://github.com/cycjimmy/semantic-release-action/actions/runs/3278377692/jobs/5396697624) It looks like a v3 tag was pushed, but it does not appear in https://github.com/cycjimmy/semantic-release-action/tags

[mgerlach]

Thanks @cycjimmy for the quick response and sorry for not having looked more thoroughly!

[mgerlach]

... however... does dependabot detect new major version branches? (re-opening to clarify this)

[cycjimmy]

... however... does dependabot detect new major version branches? (re-opening to clarify this)

I think dependabot can only detect the full version number update, such as v3.1.2

[mgerlach]

... however... does dependabot detect new major version branches? (re-opening to clarify this)

I think dependabot can only detect the full version number update, such as v3.1.2

For another action, dep.bot generated a PR for bumping v4 to v5 just recently. In that case the versions were tags, though.

[mgerlach]

@cycjimmy Unless every commit to the long-lived branches (v3, etc.) is a release, I'd still recommend to tag the most recent release also with a major version tag ("v3"), so dependabot can work with those tags.

[mgerlach]

Switched from dependabot to renovate. Renovate does not recognize branches, at least not by default. It hasn't detected the v4 branch so far. I will check config options for renovate but would like to use this as opportunity to ask for proper major version tagging again so dependabot and renovate pick up major version upgrades when using the @vx major version only notation for the action. Thx.