Add -start to release tag

[roberth]

Add -initial to release tag

Releases are never final. Previously, when the -initial suffix
wasn't there, the tags have caused confusion and security
problems when user configurations accidentally reference
the tag instead of the release branch.

Refs NixOS/nixpkgs#124364
Closes #45

[grahamc]

I understand the motivation here. We use git describe to create the version string of each channel version, a knock-on effect is every issued channel bump will include -initial as part of the string. I don't think that is a good thing, and I don't know what to do about it.

[roberth]

I understand the motivation here. We use git describe to create the version string of each channel version, a knock-on effect is every issued channel bump will include -initial as part of the string. I don't think that is a good thing, and I don't know what to do about it.

Maybe we can translate -initial tags to the short tags locally before doing anything else. Is that in a script somewhere?

[grahamc]

I don't think it is in a single script, but dispersed around, unfortunately.

[jonringer]

maybe the nix tooling should warn if a flake input is a tag?

Then again, some flakes may just provide utility functions (e.g. numtide-flakeutils). And Tagging would actually make sense

[jonringer]

Well, it's the 11th hour, and I think for the 21.05 release, I will follow the steps as laid out before me. For the next release we can be more pro-active about changing tag conventions and fixing regressions. I understand the desire to want to prevent users from assuming that YY.MM is the desired "channel", but this is very last minute. And I already got my plate full with rfc85 changes, being the only release manager, addition of the M1 platform, and dealing with the fallout of the llvmPackages regressions.

[roberth]

I already got my plate full

I understand.

Perhaps we could remove the 21.05 tag (or even the 20.09) after the release as an experiment, but let's do it after the release.

[roberth]

The choice of ${x}-initial wasn't based on an existing convention, iirc, so it's open for bikeshedding ;). GHC uses ${major}-${minor - 1}-start; minus one because of their odd minor version numbering scheme. So that'd be -start.

[jonringer]

From the hydra side, I don't think this will be much of an issue:

  version = fileContents ../.version;
  versionSuffix =
    (if stableBranch then "." else "beta") + "${toString (nixpkgs.revCount - 291486)}.${nixpkgs.shortRev}";

looks like we explicitly create a git describe like tag through pure nix.

cc @dasJ @grahamc @tomberek

[wegank]

Closed by #90.