Contradictory GHA Explicit Version Number recommendations

[MikeMcC399]

Subject

GitHub-Action

Description

• This issue is carried over from github-action version usage and guidelines github-action#671.

Problem description

The section Explicit Version Number of the GitHub Actions documentation is not aligned with the README: Explicit version recommendations in the GHA repository.

Releases in the GHA repository conform to semantic versioning conventions. This implies that known breaking changes cause a new MAJOR version to be released. Users should therefore be able to rely on this and not normally need to specify an explicit version.

GitHub Action Versioning also discusses this topic:

Recommendation: bind to major versions to get functionality and fixes but reserve binding to a specific release or SHA as a mitigation strategy for unforeseen breaks.

Suggested changes

In GitHub Actions:

1. Recommend to use the latest major version v5
2. Explain that a specific version can be used as mitigation for a compatibility problem e.g. use v5.0.8
3. Update each example and convert from specific version @v5.2.0 (which actually doesn't even exist at this time) or @v5.x.x to @v5.

[MikeMcC399]

• At least the reference to a non-existent version has been fixed in PR Correct specific version number for GitHub Action #5091 even if the rest of this issue has not been addressed as yet.

[MikeMcC399]

• I have submitted docs: improve "explicit version" section in readme github-action#852 and will come back to this issue after merge.