Managed Package (2GP) - Ancestor Version

Question

We are creating a managed package to list it to Apex Exchange. We are having issues to test our releases with beta packages because as we all know that we can't upgrade a beta package, so we need to spend a lot of time for manual steps,

What we have decided is to create release versions with the latest changes and the stable ancestorVersion. For example,

The stable release version is - 1.1.0

We are creating manage release version (1.2.0, 1.3.0, 1.4.0 .....) until 2.0.0 with the ancestor version 1.1.0

My question is can we upgrade,

1.1.0 -> 1.2.0
1.1.0 -> 1.3.0
1.1.0 -> 1.4.0
.............

I know that we can't upgrade,

1.2.0 -> 1.3.0, 1.4.0, 1.5.0, ....
1.3.0 -> 1.4.0, 1.5.0, 1.6.0, ...
............................

Is it a good approach or is anyone have any other options that we can use?

Answer 1

You need to use patch versions to enable upgrading without ancestry requirements. If you look at the documentation, they have a chart that demonstrates this.

And they explain:

Upgrade From	Upgrade To	Will This Package Upgrade Succeed?
...	...	(other examples)
0.3.3.6	0.3.5.2	Yes. Ancestry isn’t enforced for patch version upgrades that occur between package versions that share the same major and minor package version numbers. In this example, both versions begin with 0.3.

So, your packaging strategy should be more like:

Stable	Patch 1	Patch 2	Patch 3	...
1.1.0	1.1.1	1.1.2	1.1.3	...
1.2.0	1.2.1	1.2.2	1.2.3	...

You should only move up to x.x.0 versions when they are stable versions, and not use minor releases as "patches" with a common ancestor. That's not how the system is designed.