How can I test unreleased PRs against my project?

[paholg]

I've just updated my project to Bevy 0.16, and I notice some issues with shadows. I also see that there have been some fixes around shadows, and I'd love to test whether my issue is fixed already before I investigate.

However, Bevy's structure makes this difficult, and I thought I'd see if anyone has any pointers.

First, Bevy sets the version to "0.16.0-dev" on main, so a simple patch does not work. A workaround is to clone bevy and change all the versions to "0.16.0", and use this local version in a patch.

Second, Bevy has many crates that all need to be patched as well.

These two issues can be handled with judicious use of CLI tools, but I'm curious if anyone has a better flow.

I'm also running into a third, bigger issue; there are breaking changes on Bevy main. When patching, bevy_egui fails to compile, for example.

I see that the release process is to cherry-pick commits from the milestone. I wonder if it would be worth having a CI job do this automatically as PRs are merged, and set the version there to the previous version until it's ready to release. I believe this would solve my first and third issues. I'm also interested in hearing how others are tackling this.

I understand that this is a large, complex project and these things are hard to manage, and I thank everyone for your work here!

[mcobzarenco]

1. Fork bevy and clone it locally. Checkout the 0.16 release branch (so the versions are not 0.16-dev in Cargo.toml).
2. Cherry pick whatever PRs you want to try out onto a local branch.
3. Add bevy to your project as a path dependency and patch it for third party dependencies. You have to patch all the bevy crates which are depended on, not just bevy.

I'm also on a fork of Bevy since 0.16 release as there are a number of bugs (e.g. picking not taking into account the target rect of a camera, directional lights are broken if you have more than one, shadows) which should be fixed in 0.16.1. I find I eventually have to do this every release because of one bug or another.

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EDIT:

I'm also running into a third, bigger issue; there are breaking changes on Bevy main. When patching, bevy_egui fails to compile, for example.

This one is more tricky, I dont know if theres a better workflow, but eventually I end up forking and patching more and more dependencies as breaking changes accumulate. Sometimes the main branch of a dependency will track bevy main, so that makes it easier. Most often, I get to learn about the internals of my dependencies 🙂