[meta-intel] Branch and tag management

[Tom Zanussi]

On Fri, 2012-12-07 at 14:36 -0600, Tom Zanussi wrote:
> 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...
> 

OK, I just realized that the tag Song was talking about was the Tag:
sent along with the git hash in the release e-mail from Rahul - I guess
I should read things more carefully...

Anyway, they're there now, thanks to Beth...

Tom

> Tom
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