I do not understand why goreleaser does not want to do anything when it finds a non-semantic tag on the current commit.

[tchinchow]

Everything is in the title.

I think I know this is done on purpose because I did some research before posting (hope i did not miss anything obvious):
#806 relates to this problem. Folks there said that this may be reworked on in #782 but these are long closed now and the issue still persist.

In my case I was happily building another team's software for them... I'm using goreleaser following their recommendation...
I do not really release things (not with go releaser anyway)... I'm only building cross platform binaries and creating zip/targz archives...
So I'm using the --snapshot flag with goreleaser...
Then I added a release tag:
module-bla-bla-v1.0.0...

What have I done ! now it just fails, even locally !
error=failed to parse tag 'module-bla-bla-v1.0.0' as semver: Invalid Semantic Version

I did not really understand why gorelease NEEDs a git repo... for everything... that's another issue... I could live with this.

But now, I strongly believe that using --snapshot should skip all kind of checks related to version management since a local build does not relate to version management. At least if the checks cannot be skipped goreleaser should provide sane defaults and go on with these.

I also believe that these checks are insane in this configuration because they introduce a regression in people pipelines:

1. you start building your software with goreleaser, everything works.
2. some folk add a tag to your repo.
3. your build (even local) do not work any longer... even though it used to work on the same exact commit -> insane !

Last but not least... I AM using semantic versioning... its just that my tag has a prefix that goreleaser is not able to deal with .... and go releaser fails because it find itself incapable of extracting the semantics...

My point is that:
If --snapshot does not mean what it is supposed to mean...
... and supposing that goreleaser really needs to extract semantic data from a tag if it finds a tag at all, then it should either:

1. NOT work at all when there are no tag because if there are no tag, then you can't extract semantic versioning data and well it is so important than you cannot build can you (only joking / being sarcastic here... : I'm just emphasizing on how sorry I feel about not being able to build anymore for something that should really NOT block me)?
   or
2. go releaser should be less opinionated about things and give the user some slack... and do what it can do (maybe raise a warning... but NOT block all them things that used to work all of a sudden).

I'm obviously advocating for the second option ;)

Does anyone know how to force a goreleaser release --clean --snapshot build+archive locally when an unrecognized tag has been set... In particular when this tag is totally useless for the build+archiving tasks ?

[caarlos0]

That being said...

your build (even local) do not work any longer... even though it used to work on the same exact commit -> insane !

GoReleaser has no way to know that it previously built with that exact commit.
There are tag sorting/filtering options available: https://goreleaser.com/customization/git/

Last but not least... I AM using semantic versioning... its just that my tag has a prefix that goreleaser is not able to deal with .... and go releaser fails because it find itself incapable of extracting the semantics...

The spec doesn't say anything about prefixes, other than v: https://semver.org
I also never seen a case of using prefixes in tags without using monorepos...

That said, it is possible to handle it with the monorepo feature: https://goreleaser.com/customization/monorepo/

To your point, though, maybe we could allow some "pre-processor" on the tag, so to remove the prefix etc.

EDIT: see #5846

If --snapshot does not mean what it is supposed to mean...

You're right in this, it should ignore that check if --snapshot/--skip=validate. Fixed in #5845