Prep to release v0.38.0

[jsdw]

[0.38.0] - 2024-10-24

This release doesn't introduce any substantial breaking changes and focuses primarily on incremental improvements, testing and bug fixes. A few of the highlights include:

• #1785: Support decoding V5 extrinsics in blocks (currently Subxt will still submit V4 extrinsics). This also unifies our extrinsic decoding logic into one place.
• #1802: Stabilizing the subxt::backend::unstable::UnstableBackend (it's now called subxt::backend::chain_head::ChainHeadBackend). This backend can be used to interact with the modern chainHead RPC methods exposed by Smoldot and compliant RPC nodes. See this example.
• #1803: Stabilizing the reconnecting-rpc-client. See this example.
• #1720: A nice little QoL improvement if you have the raw runtime WASM and would like to generate an interface directly from that (ie with #[subx(runtime_path = "path/to/runtime.wasm")]).
• #1661: Support loading keys directly from the PolkadotJS JSON to be used in Subxt.
• #1638: Improve support for Eth style chains by defining a 20-byte account ID type directly in subxt-core. See this example.

The notable changes in this release are as follows:

Added

• add reconnecting tests for unstable_backend (#1765)
• add support for generating metadata from runtime wasm files (#1720)
• support loading keys from Polkadot-JS accounts (#1661)
• allow tx payloads to be boxed (#1690)
• add hash method to ExtrinsicDetails (#1676)
• expose secret_key method for ecdsa::Keypair and eth::Keypair (#1628)
• add 20-byte account id to subxt_core (#1638)

Changed

• make it clearer which extrinsic failed to decode (#1835)
• chore(deps): bump frame-metadata from 16 to 17 (#1836)
• chore(deps): bump scale family crates, primitive-types and impl-serde (#1832)
• chore(deps): replace instant with web-time (#1830)
• deps: use polkadot-sdk umbrella crate (#1786)
• stabilize reconnecting-rpc-client (#1803)
• stabilize chainhead backend (#1802)
• derive serialize on more types (#1797)
• use frame-decode for core extrinsic decode logic (including v5 support) (#1785)
• reconn-rpc-client: parse URL before connecting (#1789)
• update proc_macro_error to proc_macro_error2 (#1767)
• chore(deps): update Smoldot to the latest version (#1400)
• remove unneeded ?Sized bound and replace never type with () (#1758)
• improve test coverage for legacy Backend impl (#1751)
• add integration tests for unstable-reconnecting-rpc-client (#1711)
• replace reconnecting-jsonrpsee-ws-client with subxt-reconnecting-rpc-client (#1705)
• allow PartialExtrinsic to be held across await points (#1658)
• chore(deps): bump jsonrpsee from 0.22.5 to 0.23.1 (#1656)

Fixed

• fix stripping metadata in the case where enums like RuntimeCall are handed back (#1774)
• fix: defalt-feature -> default-features Cargo.toml (#1828)
• avoid hang by notifying subscribers when the backend is closed (#1817)
• fix: error message on rpc errors (#1804)
• docs: fix typos (#1776)
• examples: fix reconnecting logging target (#1733)
• docs: fix spelling issues (#1699)
• chore: fix some comments (#1697)
• codegen: Fix decode error by adding #[codec(dumb_trait_bound)] (#1630)