Pin font icons versions to latest

[sronveaux]

This small PR pins the Material Design Icons and material-icons to latest available versions.
This is part of the must-have points to address before Wegue v3 is out and is thus mentioned in the upgrade notes.

The PR does nothing in practice, as the versions present inside the package.json file were:

• "@mdi/font": "^7.2.96"
• "material-icons": "^1.13.9"

As latest versions are 7.4.47 for MDI and 1.13.14 for material-icons and as dependencies were pinned with a ^, someone who had installed dependencies lately was already fetching those latest versions.
However, as discussed in #319 some times ago, changing version of those icon fonts can bring bad surprises as some icons are removed or replaced from version to version. In our case, no icon disappeared but some were updated and so can have a different visual even between minor version updates. That's why I propose to pin those fonts to the exact version as is already the case for OpenLayers and Proj4.

I also propose to move them from the devDependencies to the dependencies section as they are clearly part of the assets distributed at runtime and are not dev-only. In practice, as we're using Vite, the change has no impact, it is purely philosophical and merely clarifies the use that is made of these packages.

[fschmenger]

Hi @sronveaux,
I'm short on time but can you check which recent version upgrade of @mdi/font or material-icons introduced into Wegue had breaking changes?
In theory pinning down to an exact version shouldn't be necessary, as long as the respective packages do semantic versioning properly. If they really screwed it up within the same minor version, should we consider using the ~version “Approximately equivalent to version” operator instead?

[chrismayer]

Totally agree that these are no devDependecies.

Regarding pinpointing: If we can assure that semantic versioning is used by these 2 packages we could use ~ or ^, otherwise I am also fine with pinning them.

[chrismayer]

I just read again carefully the description of @sronveaux and this

However, as discussed in #319 some times ago, changing version of those icon fonts can bring bad surprises as some icons are removed or replaced from version to version. In our case, no icon disappeared but some were updated and so can have a different visual even between minor version updates.

makes me +1 for pinpointing the versions. I also checked the repos of @mdi/font and material-icons and they are quite intransparent, what changed and what is part of the releases, which also makes me feel pinpointing could be a good idea.

[sronveaux]

Hi @fschmenger and @chrismayer and thanks for your returns,

I totally agree that using the minor version ^ when possible and using the patch ~ otherwise is the rule to follow as much as possible.

What makes me change my mind for those icon fonts is exactly the lack of traceability between versions.
Just to give some more information about what can be found:

• Concerning Material Design Icons, there is a changelog that can be viewed here in which we can see what can be assimilated as breaking changes, going back from the latest major version update:
  • V7.0.96: latest major release
  • V7.1.96: 31 updated icons and 3 renamed icons
  • V7.2.96: 1 renamed icon
  • V7.3.67: 9 updated icons
  • V7.4.47: 4 updated icons
• Concerning material-icons, we cannot find any changelog and have to delve ourselves in the repository to see what happens. The only thing we can see is the icon version numbers pinned in a json file. Just to give some examples:
  • V1.13.9: Taken as reference
  • V1.13.10: 5 updated icon versions
  • V1.13.11: 6 updated icon versions
  • V1.13.12: 1 updated icon version
  • V1.13.13: 1 updated icon version
  • V1.13.14: 1 updated icon version

So now all depends what we call a breaking change. Except that MDI has two real breaking changes listed here where some icons have been renamed, the rest is conform to semver in a sense, they patch icons, so it is not a breaking change, your app will still function properly if the fonts are updated, but there is a risk that the visual changes somehow. It would be a pity that the updated icons are the ones you use for sure but this could happen. login and logout were modified in MDI@7.3.67 for example.

As for using the ~ instead of pinning exact versions, with material-icons we can see that the problem would persist and concerning MDI, if they follow their current logic, you only get a single patch version per minor version so this would change nothing in itself but I preferred to uniformize the way icon fonts are managed and be careful... even though in the end, those icon fonts should not be updated that much in the future...

Just tell me what you think about this and I'll adapt as necessary!

Cheers,
Sébastien

[fschmenger]

Ok, +1 for pinning then, thanks for the detailed explanantion!
Feel free to merge.