Note that we need to merge webdriverio/webdriverio#12499 first

Note that this is technically a breaking change since some dependents might be relying on this type. However, I would consider this is more like bug fix since this does not align with the runtime behavior. Also, it should be easy to notice and fix in dependents just by adding global expect type in their side so I personally think it's fine to release this change as a patch or a minor release

For the compatibility with the main webdriverio packages, It would be nice if we can make sure that webdriverio package older before webdriverio/webdriverio#12502 will never use the new version of expect-webdriverio.

However, this means we should bump the major version of expect-webdriverio, which is too much for this small change IMHO

Last time we did this, things broke when running the Jasmine framework. I think this needs some testing with both Mocha and Jasmine to verify both work as expected

@erwinheitzman I think they broke probably because we did not have webdriverio/webdriverio#12499

We can merge and publish webdriverio/webdriverio#12499 and webdriverio/webdriverio#12502 first

I just confirmed that both Jasmine tests and Mocha tests do not break with the change in this PR and webdriverio/webdriverio#12499 using https://github.com/naruaway-sandbox/webdriverio-test-repros

While testing, I realized that we should also update the top-level types field as well so I updated this PR

We can merge and publish webdriverio/webdriverio#12499 and webdriverio/webdriverio#12502 first

Merged them.

I will release v8 as soon as possible. I don't think we would expect any breaking changes from that.

@naruaway can you think of any potential issues that might come up for people that update their packages?

@christian-bromann Thanks!

can you think of any potential issues that might come up for people that update their packages?

I believe there is no potential issue for people using webdriverio@8 after releasing v8 from webdriverio/webdriverio#12502

My reasoning is based on webdriverio/webdriverio#12499 (comment). In short, it just adds additional global declaration which will conflict with the current version of expect-webdriverio but the types are the same and that conflict is suppressed by skipLibCheck: true of tsconfig.json. Technically it will cause issues for people who are using skipLibCheck: false. However, webdriverio and its related packages already have type errors so we do not need to care such users IMHO. Also, skipLibCheck: true is very common in the whole ecosystem (e.g. Next.js)

I will cut a release today of v8 and this package as minor updates.

Hi @christian-bromann, if you are going to bump version for packages, probably it's better to bump minor @wdio/globals v8 first so that consumers can get the update (this is "bug fix") for @wdio/globals first. If they receive the update for expect-webdriverio first before updating @wdio/globals , they will encounter type error (only type error though). In that case, they need to update @wdio/globals later but it might be hard to realize that this is the way

Released in expect-webdriverio v4.13.0 and webdriverio v8.36.0.

Thanks! I just verified the newly released combination for sure.
The fix works perfectly! 🎉 Thanks for the review and help 👍

Before the fix

There is no type error but in this case it will cause runtime error since there is no expect global variable loaded

After the fix

✅ There is type error, which is expected since it aligns with the reality in runtime

Thanks for confirming!