Rejiggering the branches

[Wilfredo Velazquez]

Maybe I'm a bit naive, but what about a setup like:

main - development happens against this as PRs and so on

When you do a release, tag it against this branch.

For the topic of people staying on 3.3 or whatever version they prefer: if
such a situation were to actually happen, that they submit a fix that
specifically patches a bug in 3.3, you can create a hotfix branch rooted at
that tagged version.
Meaning, don't create a branch until you need one.

The risk of course is having greatly diverging features added to some older
version, but I'd like to hope that after however many decades, ASDF is at
least mature enough that something like that wouldn't happen and only
hotfixes would be applied to those release branches, if any at all.

Finally, if you truly desire a 'stable' equivalent (releases only), simply
move development from 'main' to 'dev', and only fast forward 'main' to
'dev' when a stable release happens.

eg

dev - development branch, changes voa prs, patches, etc

main - stable releases branch. fast forwarded to (or merge-commited) 'dev'
when a release occurs.

tag every release. If somebody in the future finds a hotfix in some old
version, create a branch at that tag.


But that's just my two cents. Best of luck

On Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 4:35 PM Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:

> 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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