[meta-intel] Branch and tag management

[Tom Zanussi]

On Fri, 2012-12-07 at 11:26 -0800, Darren Hart wrote:
> I discussed branching and tagging with Beth today.
> 
> Beth uses branches for milestones as they sometimes change before the
> final milestone build is complete. For reasons largely based in
> paranoia, she would like to retain the milestone tags as long as the
> milestones can be downloaded from the website, which is about 6 months.
> 
> So, what this means for meta-intel is the following. We will continue to
> use branches for milestones and replace them with tags once the final
> milestone is built. THIS MEANS THAT MILESTONE BRANCHES MUST TRACK MASTER
> EXACTLY. NO CHERRY PICKING, FAST FORWARDS ONLY. If we don't do that, the
> branch must stay around as it won't be exactly reproducible with a tag
> once the branch is removed.
> 
> For the existing branches which do not have their HEAD also in master,
> they will have to remain until the download is remove. This means that
> eventually we will be able to purge the static milestone branches. The
> only permanent branches will be master and one branch per release (no
> release-next) branches should be needed.
> 
> I haven't replaced any of the old branches with tags quite yet as I
> wanted this group to have a chance to respond or raise concerns before
> we put this into effect. Any additional thoughts?
> 

Up until the 1.4 M1 milestone RCs, nobody but Beth had anything to do
with the milestone (or release) branching and tagging (which also
explains why nobody has any clue about the current set of tags and
branches in there), so I'm not sure what we really need here.

For the past couple RCs, Beth has asked me to create an RC branch for
the RC, which is fine, but all I did was simply take what was in master
at the time and create new branch with the current contents of master.
Why can't we just have this happen automatically, or for that matter,
just have the milestone build process create a tag at the current HEAD
of master as a record of what was built.  Or if that won't work for some
reason, at least have a scheduled date and time for each RC or release
that we have to have whichever branch ready for the build - I don't
think the current ad hoc tracking down repo maintainers to create a new
branch will really work well over time. 

Other than cherry-picking fixes and BSP-specific commits into the
official release branches following a release, I don't see why we have
to worry about the details of the branching or tagging for milestones or
releases.

Also, are people expecting certain tags for the final releases?  Again,
not having been involved in the branching and tagging before, I don't
know, but Song apparently has already received complaints about missing
tags.  Which tags are those and what are they supposed to look like?
The current set in both meta-intel and poky don't seem consistent, so
hard to tell from that...

Tom