[Building Sakai] 2.6.x pom <version> after 2.6.0 release

[Anthony Whyte]

Opening this conversation up to the dev list for further comments:

Steve--well, in a world were we could use the Maven release plugin  
with the whole of Sakai (which does not exist at present; although I  
think we can sort out the problem with some project/pom naming  
realignments) we could perform releases from the 2.6.x branch as we  
do now from K1.  In such a case the release plugin would generate a  
2.6.0 tag and then the plugin would increment the pom <version>  
number of the 2.6.x branch to 2.6.1-SNAPSHOT and commit the changes  
automatically.  Then 2.6.0 artifacts are created and placed in the  
repo.  This is how K1 <versioning> works and I expect Ian intends for  
K2 to work the same way.   All of this you know so I apologize here  
for stating the obvious.

The point I am trying to make above is that the maintenance branch  
should be viewed as a SNAPSHOT set of code that by definition is  
rather more fluid in nature than a point release (using M2 as a fixed  
version number as you recommend obscures this).  Indeed, it is no  
longer the case that we (the Foundation) actively advise people to  
run their production instances off a maintenance branch.  Our goal  
has been to undercut the old adage that friends don't let friends run  
Sakai point releases in production by producing reliable maintenance  
releases that are produced regularly to a well understood timeline  
(the latter still a goal).  We have had a modicum of success here  
with the 2.5 maintenance series as I see now that a fair number of  
schools are running 2.5.2, 2.5.3 and 2.5.4 in production.  I  
recognize that more experienced production houses tend to run off the  
maintenance branch but over time I expect this to become the  
exception rather than the rule given the number of smaller  
institutions that run (and will run) point releases of Sakai.

 From my perspective, I think consistency in our versioning practices  
is important and I believe the "Maven" practice first adopted by Ian  
works well.

trunk:  [major.minor]-SNAPSHOT
release tag: [major.minor.revision]
1.0.x branch [major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT

This is an area were I believe it would be good to settle on a  
general practice since there may be advantages to the community of  
having a few other core projects adopt their own release cycles  
independent of a general Sakai release.  Our practices are a bit  
inconsistent at present as a few examples will demonstrate:

Examples:

Sakai (after 2.6.0 release)
trunk:  [major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT  (e.g., currently 2.7.0- 
SNAPSHOT, IMHO should simply be 2.7-SNAPSHOT)
tag: [major.minor.revision] (e.g. 2.6.0)
2.6.x branch [major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT (e.g., 2.6.1-SNAPSHOT)

K1 (after 1.0.4 release)
trunk:  [major.minor]-SNAPSHOT  (e.g., 1.1-SNAPSHOT)
release tag: [major.minor.revision] (e.g. 1.0.4)
1.0.x branch [major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT (e.g., 1.0.5-SNAPSHOT)

K2 (current)
trunk:  [major.minor]-SNAPSHOT  (e.g., 0.1-SNAPSHOT)
release tag: [major.minor.revision] (no tag yet)
branch [major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT (no branch yet)

SiteStates (current)
trunk:  [major.minor]-SNAPSHOT  (e.g., 2.0-SNAPSHOT)
release tag: [major.minor.revision] (e.g., 1.2.1)
branch (no 2.6 branch yet; I assume this would be 1.2.2-SNAPSHOT)

EntityBroker (current)
trunk:  [major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT  (e.g., 1.3.7-SNAPSHOT, IHMO  
should simply be 1.3-SNAPSHOT)
release tag: [major.minor.revision] (e.g., 1.3.6)
2.6.x branch [major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT (currently, 1.3.6- 
SNAPSHOT, IHMO should be 1.3.7-SNAPSHOT)


Cheers,

Anth


On Mar 26, 2009, at 12:20 PM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:

> My only worry with this is is that the number will change, rather  
> than be stable like the 2.5.x series of M2. So then someone doing a  
> simple SVN update of just one module perhaps will get an updated  
> POM which doesn't match the rest of their dependencies.
>
> My feeling is that the branch version number should be more stable  
> since we advise people to run it in production?
>
> Hmm,
> Steve
>
>
> On 26 Mar 2009, at 16:13, Anthony Whyte wrote:
>
>> Currently, 2.6.x poms have a version of 2.6.0RC1-SNAPSHOT (it  
>> really should have just been 2.6.0-SNAPSHOT).  Steve has enquired  
>> what the <version> for the *x branch will be after the release of  
>> 2.6.0 (the release to occur from a 2.6.0 branch that I will create  
>> when we do the first RC tag).
>>
>> My recommendation is:  2.6.1-SNAPSHOT, the revision number to be  
>> incremented by +1 whenever we do a maintenance release (e.g. 2.6.2- 
>> SNAPSHOT, etc.).
>>
>> Any objections?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Anthony
>