How are Bicep types going to be updated?

[JustinGrote]

I came across an issue where a property I need is not available as a Bicep type (the 2020-08-01 is not available):
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.azure.management.network.models.route.hasbgpoverride?view=azure-dotnet

It made me consider several questions:

1. how these types will be updated going forward as the ARM api grows?
2. Is it just going to be part of new bicep version releases or will there be a separate update mechanism?
3. What is the lag time going to be?
4. Will there be supported major versions? E.g. if I'm on Bicep 1.2 and due to some breaking change or whatever I can't update to Bicep 2.1, will I still get new types as bicep 1.2.5, 1.2.6, etc?

[anthony-c-martin]

Great questions!

1. how these types will be updated going forward as the ARM api grows?

1. At present they are being generated under the bicep-types-az repo, and bundled into the Bicep build via nuget. This means that they are linked to the version of Bicep you have installed, and you'll need to upgrade to pick up any new types.

2. Is it just going to be part of new bicep version releases or will there be a separate update mechanism?

2. Yes it's going to be part of the Bicep version releases. We plan to change that going forwards, as we don't want the set of types to be tied to a particular release. I'm sure there was a GitHub issue for that somewhere, but I can't find it anywhere...

3. What is the lag time going to be?

3. At the moment, ~1 month max, certainly not ideal. Note however that we won't block you from using recent api-versions to deploy, you';ll just have to deal with 'missing type' warnings, and absolutely no validation or completions.

4. Will there be supported major versions? E.g. if I'm on Bicep 1.2 and due to some breaking change or whatever I can't update to Bicep 2.1, will I still get new types as bicep 1.2.5, 1.2.6, etc?

4. Yes, the interface between bicep & types library should be very static and carefully considered for back-compatibility.

[JustinGrote]

Thanks for the detail, and yes I noticed I could do it anyways with a warning, I did definitely appreciate this "at your own risk" approach rather than simply being locked out until the type is implemented, which is the major limitation of some other approaches (e.g. Farmer)