[racket-dev] git tag (was: package-system update)

About a month ago, Matthew Flatt wrote:
> At Thu, 18 Jul 2013 09:11:28 +0200, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:
> >     When I check the current HEAD tag of the master this is what I get. Is
> >     this what it should be if not can it be fixed so it reflects reality?
> > 
> >    ~/devel/git-sources/racket $ git describe --tags HEAD
> >    v5.0.1-12863-g3c0b799
> 
> I think this result reflects that we don't generally tag commits in the
> master branch. We tag releases, but those are normally commits (that
> were constructed via branches) that are not reachable from HEAD. It
> happens that v5.0.1 coincides with a commit reachable form HEAD (for
> reasons I don't know or remember), and so that've why you get a
> "v5.0.1" release.
> 
> Maybe it would be good to add a tag (more recent than "v5.0.1") that
> doesn't include a version number, so it's not so misleading? Or is it
> worth adjusting our release process to introduce a tag that indicates
> when a release version branched from master?

The current system is to have a `stable' branch always pointing at the
most recently released version of the repository.  Then on releases a
`release' branch is made up based on `master'.  When the release is
done, `stable' is advanced to the point where `release' is, but this
is done in an explicit way that makes it point to the previous
`stable' as a parent -- so the two lines (`master' and `stable') are
kept in parallel.  This is why `git describe' looks weird -- as
Matthew said, it just finds some tag in the past that happens to be
the last one before this was started.

This was done due to some problems with 3rd party packages who follow
the repository -- I don't remember the details, but David Bremner was
the one pointing at the problem so he might be able to explain it.
(And if there's no problem, then it is probably better to not do that
anymore.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!