[development] RFC: 2 proposed changes to CVS branch/tag conventions

[Derek Wright]

Hello world,

In working on moving update_status.module into core, and continuing  
to field support requests about proper branching and release  
management for contrib, I'm proposing 2 simple but important changes  
to our branch and tag naming conventions starting with D6 and beyond:


1) http://drupal.org/node/147493

What: All contrib branches must have the "--N" part of their name.   
No more special case for DRUPAL-6 == 6.x-1.* vs. DRUPAL-6--2 ==  
6.x-2.*.  DRUPAL-6 would be prohibited.  Maintainers must add  
DRUPAL-6--1 when they want to release the 6.x-1.* stable series.

Why: help remind everyone that each release series belongs in its own  
branch, and remove a weird special case that's confusing our  
maintainers and users.


2) http://drupal.org/node/147494

What: Any official release (core or contrib) with "extra" (e.g.  
"beta", "RC", etc) must have a specific format for the extra field:  
no hyphens or underscores, and everything must be uppercase.

Why: make a 1:1 mapping of tags to version strings possible  
(currently, every tag has exactly 1 version string, but a given  
version string might have N possible tags).


Please read each issue linked above for details, motivation, etc.   
Both changes require no code, just some config changes to our CVS  
access control scripts and a little handbook editing.

If you oppose either one, please comment in the appropriate issue,  
not here.  This list is very large, and generates too many long, hard- 
to-follow threads as it is.  Many of you won't care at all, and  
probably just trust my judgement on such matters by now.  So, if you  
have questions, feedback, or objections, please comment in the issue  
and spare everyone on this list the noise of a debate they're not  
interested in.

Thanks,
-Derek (dww)

p.s. If there are no legitimate objections raised by Thursday, May  
31st, I'm going to close discussion and implement these configuration  
changes.  I want to ensure that D6 starts with a clean slate, so I  
don't want to wait until people have already started adding D6- 
related CVS tags and branches.