After working on 1.5.2 and today's branch snafu, I think I've come to
the conclusion that our branch naming is more pain than it's worth (I
believe I was the one who primarily argued for branch names as they are
current implemented, so take that as you want).
* Trying to making a new branch for the "next" version as a release is
happening forces you to fight with Maven. Maven expects that your "next"
is going to be on the same branch and the way it makes commits and bumps
versions for you encourages this. Using a new branch for "next" is more
manual work for the release manager.
* The time after we make a release, there's a bit of confusion (I do it
too, just not publicly... yet) about "what branch do I put this fix for
_version_ in?". It's not uncommon to put it in the "old" branch instead
of the new one. The problem arises when the old branch has already been
deleted. If a developer has an old version of that branch, there's
nothing to tell them "hey, your copy of this branch is behind the
remote's copy of this branch. I'm not accepting your push!" Having a
single branch for a release line removes this hassle.
"Pictorially", I'm thinking we would change from the active branches
{1.5.3-SNAPSHOT, 1.6.1-SNAPSHOT, 1.6.2-SNAPSHOT, master} to {1.5, 1.6,
master}. (where a git tag would exist for the 1.6.1 RCs).
IIRC, the big argument for per-release branches was of encouraging
frequent, targeted branches (I know the changes for this version go in
this branch). I think most of this can be mitigated by keeping up with
frequent releases and coordination with the individual cutting the release.
In short, I'm of the opinion that I think we should drop the
".z-SNAPSHOT" suffix from branch names (e.g. 1.5.3-SNAPSHOT) and move to
a shorter "x.y" (e.g. 1.5) that exists for the lifetime of that version.
I think we could also use this approach if/when we change our versioning
to start using the "x" component of "x.y.z".
Thoughts?
- Josh
- [DISCUSS] Thinking about branch names Josh Elser
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