bevy/release-content/migration_guides.md

Bevy's Migration Guide Process

Hi! Did someone add M-Needs-Migration-Guide to your PR? If so, you're in the right place. Let's talk about how this process works.

When we make breaking changes to Bevy, we need to communicate them to users so their libraries and applications can be moved to the new Bevy version. To do this, we write and ship a migration guide for every major Bevy version. To avoid a crunch at the end of the cycle as we write all of these, Bevy asks authors (and reviewers) to write a draft migration guide as part of the pull requests that make breaking changes.

Where to put your migration guides

Each major Bevy version (e.g. 0.12, or 2.0) will get its own migration guide. The draft migration guides for the current cycle are organized in the bevyengine/bevy/release-content/migration-guides folder.

When we publish our first release candidate for a cycle, these notes are merged together and moved from bevyengine/bevy into bevyengine/bevy-website, where they will receive a final editing pass.

If your PR introduces a new breaking change relative to the previous version, you should start a new guide by copying the template into a new file in the migration-guides folder. You should also update the existing migration guides in the other files, if your change effects them.

What to put in your draft migration guide

Migration guides are intended to briefly communicate:

• what has been changed since the last release?
• why did we make this breaking change?
• how can users migrate their existing code?

Draft migration guides do not need to be polished: it's okay if you're not a native English speaker or aren't a wordsmith. Editing is easy; we just want to have an expert's view on the questions above.

When writing migration guides, prefer terse, technical language, and be sure to include terms that users might search for. Migration guides are not read end-to-end: instead, they are navigated via Ctrl+F as the reader follows the compiler errors and bugs.

Grouping changes into migration guides

Migration guides should reflect the complete experience of migrating from the last major Bevy version to the next one. If there are multiple breaking changes layered on top of each other, you should edit the existing migration guide, rather than write a new one.

While some brave users live on Bevy's main branch, we can trust them to use the draft migration guides and read the PRs in question if needed.

As a result, each draft migration should be given a clear name matching the section title. These titles should reflect the name of the old feature that was broken or changed.

Note on the #[deprecated] attribute

Rust provides a very helpful #[deprecated] attribute, which is a compiler-aware way to mark a piece of Rust code as obsolete and slated for removal. This can be a nice a tool to ease migrations, because it downgrades errors to warnings and makes the migration information available right in the user's IDE.

However, it's not always possible to use this attribute, and Bevy does not consider it to be a substitute to a migration guide entry.

#[deprecated(since = "0.17.0", note = "This message will appear in the deprecation warning.")]
struct MyStruct;

Style Guide

Keep it short and sweet:

• What, then why, then how to migrate.

• Some helpful standardized phrases:

  • OldType is now NewType. Replace all references and imports.
  • The Struct::method method now requires an additional magnitude: f32 argument.
  • Enum has a new variant, Enum::NewVariant, which must be handled during match statements.
  • The Type::method method has been removed. Use Type::other_method instead.
  • The crate::old_module module is now crate::new_module. Update your imports.
  • function now returns Option<String> instead of String.

• Make sure it's searchable by directly naming the types and methods involved.

• Use backticks for types, methods, and modules (e.g. Vec<T> or core::mem::swap).

• Use bullet points when listing affected types / functions of a breaking change, or when the listing several complex steps for migrating. Avoid bullets for simple migrations, however.

• Avoid headings. If you must, use only level-two (##) headings.

• It's often useful to give a code example explaining what a migration may look like.

  // 0.15
  fn my_system(world: &mut World) {
      world.old_method();
  }
  
  // 0.16
  fn my_system(world: &mut World) {
      // Use `new_method()` instead.
      world.new_method();
  }
  

  Often you will want to give two examples of the same piece of code, one for the old version and one for the new. You can designate which is which using comments, such as // 0.15 and // 0.16. Avoid code diffs if possible, as they do not syntax highlight Rust code.

• Make sure to reference the currently published version of a crate when writing a migration guide. See docs.rs for a quick reference to the existing public API.

• When moving items to a new module or crate, consider a simple table listing the moved items and the before and after paths. For example, "Foo has been moved from bar::foo to baz" could be written:

  Relocations

  Item	0.15 Path	0.16 Path
  Foo	bar::foo	baz