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

[Seth Theriault]

Anthony Whyte wrote:

> 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).

Pardon my ignorance and/or bad recollection, but can someone 
provide a Web page or message archive thread that states this 
recommendation? And does the Foundation intend to follow its own 
recommmendations given that www.sakaiproject.org appears to be 
running "Sakai 2.5.x" at the moment?

Personally, despite the recent gains in making point releases 
under 2.5, I don't think this process is reliable enough to 
ensure timely releases (the future goal). I think the usual 
balance between "official imprimateur" and overall reliability is 
still in favor of the maintenance release for organizations that 
have the time, energy, and people to use it.

> 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 versioning scheme complicates any attempt to build a 
non-"core" Sakai tool on a production system built with the 
maintenance branch. Many "contrib" authors are maintaining 2.5.x 
branches for their tools using "M2" as the version, which 
minimizes the "patch pain" that I and other have to go through 
when building new releases. If we were to adopt the 
"[major.minor.revision]-SNAPSHOT" practice for the 2.6.x branch, 
I would have to redo all the version-related patches every time 
someone does a point release and I use a rev number higher than 
that.

Instead, I would propose that a maintenance branch use 
[major.minor.X] or [major.minor]-MAINT as its versions. These 
identify it correctly as the maintenance branch but ensure a 
consistent label for outside use.

Seth