[tor-dev] [tor-relays] Marker branch for current tor release(s)

[Nick Mathewson]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 4:02 AM, teor <teor2345 at gmail.com> wrote:
> (I dropped tor-relays, we can tell them when we reach a conclusion.)
>
> Hi Nick,
>
> Can we maintain an "alpha" branch with the latest Tor alpha,
> and a "stable" branch with the latest Tor stable?

Hm. I'm not strictly opposed to the idea, but I'd like to think about
how it would work. The history of such branches would get pretty
convoluted.  While everything released from master precedes other
stuff released from master in history, the releases that we cut from
release-0.x.y don't precede releases in other series.  So we'd either
need to do force-pushes or weird merges here.   And we really really
don't want to have force-pushes in the canonical repo.

I'm also wondering about tags here: If we do the force-push route,
then tags stay simple.  But if we do the "weird merges" route, we'd
not actually be giving the actual tagged versions of the releases,
which suggests a downgrade.

One possibility is more structured tags: whenever a release becomes
the latest stable, we could tag it "latest-stable-YYYYMMDD"; whenever
a branch becomes latest alpha, we could tag it
"latest-alpha-YYYYMMDD".  That would make it easy to automatically
find the latest release (git tag | grep ^latest-alpha | tail -1),  but
not require any force-pushes or weird history.

Another possibility here: what if instead of using separate branches
for this, we used a separate repository, and said "this repository
will get force-pushes; it's only meant for tracking releases."  That
way we could keep our git history clean, and keep force-pushes out of
the official repo.

-- 
Nick