Rejiggering the branches

[Robert Goldman]

On 13 Jul 2021, at 10:20, Eric Timmons wrote:

> Attila Lendvai <attila.lendvai at gmail.com> writes:
>> what i would do:
>>
>>    - one branch that holds the bleeding edge. i'd call it main, just 
>> to go
>>    with the flow.
>>    - branches for ASDF versions (down to the desired resolution, 
>> probably
>>    major.minor), so that you can easily cherry pick or backport fixes 
>> into
>>    them. a new version-branch is forked off of main whenever a 
>> release happens.
>>    - optionally a stable *tag* as an indirection to the latest 
>> release. it
>>    communicates which specific git revision is it that the maintainer
>>    considers the stable state at any moment in time. it comes handy 
>> e.g. in CI
>>    scripts that want to check out the latest ASDF release, etc...
>>
>
> I like this!
>
> IMO a big win of having the major and minor number in the branch name 
> is
> that it's a better experience for users. If it's a single 
> `maintenance`
> branch then a git pull may wind up changing their version completely. 
> If
> they have any local changes as well, things might get a bit hairy when
> `maintenance` changes minor versions as that wouldn't be a 
> fast-forward
> update.

I guess I'm surprised you say this.  I don't *ever* want us to have more 
than a single live maintenance branch.  I absolutely *never* want to 
support more than a single `main` version and a single `stable` version.

So, to me, it's a *feature* that if you git pull maintenance and you 
find out that what you are maintaining has changed.  And to me it seems 
like a *bad* user experience if I can end up wasting my time interacting 
with a branch that is obsolete and of no further interest.  I'd rather 
know that things have changed -- and I would expect to do `git pull 
--ff-only` on `stable`.

I am surprised that so many people want to have a branch like `v3.3`. 
This adds a memory burden that `stable` doesn't have, in the same way 
that Raymond pointed out that having `dev` adds a memory burden beyond 
using the standard `main` or `master`.  Honestly, I find it hard to 
remember whether 3.3 or 3.4 is the current released version!

I'm curious -- how many of the people who want `v3.3` instead of 
`stable` expect that they would actually interact with this branch, 
checking it out and supplying merge requests, versus just thinking it's 
better in some ideal fashion?
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