Release dance for level@5

[vweevers]

Prerelease, in topological order:

• level@next (using new level-packager and leveldown)
  • level-packager@5 (using new levelup and encoding-down)
    • encoding-down@6 (due to abstract-leveldown@6)
      • Remove _setupIteratorOptions (Remove _setupIteratorOptions encoding-down#74)
      • Prepare changelog and upgrade guide (Prepare changelog and upgrade guide for 6.0.0 encoding-down#73)
      • Release (Release new major v6.0.0 encoding-down#71)
    • levelup@4 (using new level-iterator-stream and deferred-leveldown)
      • level-iterator-stream@4 (due to readable-stream@3)
      • deferred-leveldown@5 (due to abstract-leveldown@6)
      • Remove IE10 from Airtap (due to readable-stream@3) (Remove IE10 from Airtap levelup#625)
      • Release (Release new major v4.0.0 levelup#623)
    • Release (Release new major v5.0.0 packager#78)
  • leveldown@next (due to abstract-leveldown@6 + N-API rewrite)
    • Release RC 5.0.0-0
    • Patch prebuildify to handle custom targets while using --napi (Allow passing in custom -t when --napi is used prebuild/prebuildify#17)
    • Patch node-gyp-build to handle --build-from-source (Patch node-gyp-build to handle --build-from-source leveldown#566)
    • Release RC 5.0.0-1
  • Release (Release 5.0.0-0 with dist-tag "next" level#132)

Stable:

• level@5 (using new leveldown)
  • Add more tests to encoding-down
  • leveldown@5
    • Release (Release new major v5.0.0 leveldown#550)
  • Release (Release new major v5.0.0 level#123)

Work that can happen in parallel but is not necessarily blocking:

• Reorder v6 upgrade guide (Reorder v6 upgrade guide abstract-leveldown#317)
• Reach out to and/or canary test dependents
  • ssb and flume: upgrade to level(down) 5 ssbc/ssb-server#598 (comment)
  • fastify-leveldb: Update level to the latest version 🚀 fastify/fastify-leveldb#18 (comment)
  • PouchDB?
  • others?
• Update awesome (Level/awesome@1602c2c)

[ralphtheninja]

One approach to this could be:

• release encoding-down, levelup and level-packager as is (without the extra tests)
• release a new next version of leveldown
• release a new next version of level
• try out the next version of level in important dependents and collect feedback
• add tests to encoding-down (+ other modules?) based on feedback
• release leveldown
• release level
• party 🎈 🍰 and profit !

[vweevers]

@ralphtheninja Sounds good, I think. I need a little bit of time to wrap my head around it :)

[vweevers]

OK let's go for it. Having a next version of level will make testing much easier.

I've updated the tasks above.

[vweevers]

Phew. Done!