How about quarterly. I personally wouldn't consider that too often, in terms of sending the update package over the wire, and it would be regular enough to not having to live with a bug for too long. Question remains then if you want to immediately update to the latest version, or want to lag a version or 2 behind, to see if there are any obvious bugs that you might be introducing.

@Luuklag Yep, that's definitely a regular cycle.

This is a good question. I'll bring it up internally to formally decide as to what team will be responsible for keeping this up to date as well as how we're going to ensure that we're alerted when a new version comes out. As it currently stands, I have a few OSS side projects relying on highlightjs that get weekly notifications when dependency updates hit npm, so at the very least, I'll be aware of them. Thanks for bringing this to my top of mind. This will be very important moving forward, because, as you mentioned, highlightjs is being actively maintained.

Would an update address the problem exhibited in unix.stackexchange.com/a/608110/5132 ?

This is all the more relevant as the current roster of lexers supported by highlightjs is quite basic. It supports a lot of languages, but many only at a rudimentary level (then again, it’s hard to do worse than the current Stack Overflow syntax highlighting …).

As an aside, it pains me to say that I'll be technically shipping this today with an out-of-date version. highlight.js released a 10.2.0 release the day before posting this announcement. We're shipping 10.1.2, so this will be a good test of how long it takes to get an update out the door ;).

@BenKelly 10.2.1 has a pretty important fix you probably want before you go rolling out across the whole network. The match "skip" (in some cases, like end must match begin, etc.) functionality was broken in some cases (depends on input code). While our entire test suite actually still passed (which is pretty incredible) some code snippets could end up very badly broken (highlighting just stops abruptly in the middle, etc).

@JoshGoebel Thanks for the update and the support! 10.2.0 is the current version on Meta. I will get a 10.2.1 merged before going live on Thursday. Good looking out and thanks for all your hard work on the library

@BenKelly re: "how we're going to ensure that we're alerted when a new version comes out" -> perhaps just watch releases on github?

I just released 10.3.0. Start the stopwatches. ;-) @benKelly Sometimes there follows a 10.x.1 release a few days later if we messed up anything major, sometimes not. So not sure if you'd want to consider that in your update policy, some sort of small adoption delay. That said this was mostly grammar stuff (no parser internals) so hopefully we're good. :)

@BenKelly Before you go on and update to 10.3 (which I hope will happen soon), could you please have a look over at the TeX.sx meta? The new version requires some adjustments on the highlighting style sheet and it would be best to coordinate this in advance.

@JoshGoebel Just a quick question: will you be watching this site for bug reports and feature requests from users for Highlight.js, or do you prefer that they be posted on the repository issue tracker instead?

I'm unsure long-term. Right now I'm trying to get SO off to a good start. I think that mutually benefits all. I only see the big threads though, I don't go hunting. I worry about overwhelming our bug tracker (I have no idea expected traffic if everyone just filed issues there)... also filling it with things that are perhaps SO specific issues, confusion with understanding SO's implementation, etc. I think it'd be great if we had some triage helpers on the SO side to gain some understanding of SO/HLJS and then play it by ear. @SonictheMaskedWerehog

I'm quite happy to see issues for actual bugs (so we can attempt to fix them), but we don't need 100 issues "Hey my code is xyz, but it highlighted as abc"... and its often made worse because it's not obvious that's what happened... so the report comes in as "highlighting for xyz is all wrong on stackoverflow" can be hard to triage if we aren't given enough context, etc... and even when fully understood sometimes the answer is just "sorry, highlighting isn't perfect". Many of these types of issues would be hugely eliminated if SO considered tags as context (as mentioned elsewhere).

@JoshGoebel Thank you SO much for the updates, I really, really do appreciate it, but I've been a tad swamped at the moment (y'know, 2020...). I have an in-progress (internal) PR out to update to 10.3.1, but the latest bugfixes added ~10% more weight to the total bundle post-gzip. I'm working out some solutions here, so hopefully I can get the latest and greatest in place soon.

@schtandard Thanks for the heads up. I'm noting this as a TODO item on the aforementioned (internal) PR to ensure I don't miss it.

@BenKelly Hey, um, can we please take this comment conversation to a chat room? I'm getting a little tired of receiving a comment notification every time some update happens to the highlighter. It would be nice if you moved these comments to chat and continued the conversation there.

@JoshGoebel See above comment (system will only let me ping one user).

@BenKelly Thanks for the move! I think it may be a good idea to make a new room for syntax highlighter discussion, and move the messages here to that room. (I'd rename this room, but the chat system demotes rooms that were originally created as one-on-one rooms or comment archival rooms.)

@SonictheK-DayHedgehog No prob, sorry for the comment spam. I try really hard to not use my mod powers on the network (I'm not an elected mod), but your request was very reasonable. I don't know what all powers I have for creating / altering chat rooms (Teams doesn't have chat, so it honestly hasn't come up), but I'll touch base with the Community team and see what we can do there

@BenKelly No problem. Using mod powers as a staff member here on Meta.SE isn't as frowned upon compared to other sites, since for the majority of its time (after it was split from Meta.SO) it was only moderated by SE staff.

In fact, none of the mods here are elected, only appointed :)