[Question] Is it possible to detect breaking changes on Attribute Level

[Lorilatschki]

We currently planning to use CommandLineUtiles across our CLI tools. Since we want to ensure, that CLIs won't break in both, CLI level as well as behavior level (assuming a optional parameter in version 1.0.0 will be changed to a required parameter) we are looking for tooling support for that.

We found the PublicApiAnalyzers which will help to keep track on public properties/methods/types in general. With that, we can track adding new options or removed options within a CLI. So far so good.
However, if an optional parameter is accidently changed in terms of the attached [Option(...)] attribute to be mandatory now, we would like to have a similar approach to get notified or even build errors when a option is changed in a way, that it would result in a breaking change to a previous released version of the CLI tool.

We do have tests in place which testing the CLI, however having such a quality gate in place even before the tests are executed increases the quality and fast feedback.

We can implement such a roslyn analyzer our self, which also keep track on the attached attributes, maybe there is far better way to achieve this.

[natemcmaster]

The analyzers you referenced (which we also use in this project) are intended to detect changes to your library's binary surface. But I think the kind of changes you are looking for are more about ensuring that the available command line arguments and options are stable. For that, I don't know if analyzers will be capable of detecting changes to that. But, if you find a way to do it, feel free to share your findings for future people with similar questions :)