Problems with release and long living branches

[derberg]

Highlight

• to update long living branches we do normal merge, so we merge all commits from master, that are not related to the release branch, but during release semantic-release doesn't know that and treats all commits and related PRs as release related
• long living branches are tagged with release candidates but never final release

More details

For the post release task we need to solve one problem that we had with this release. Now we have a long living next-spec branch that stays there forever. When we release candidates, next-spec is tagged with RC name like for example 2.5.0-next-spec.4. Then when we do a release, tag 2.5.0 is added to master.

So what happened with this release was that for 2.6.0, the release candidate on next-spec was 2.5.0-next-spec.5 instead of 2.6.0-next-spec.1.

[9:27:17 AM] [semantic-release] › ℹ  Found git tag v2.5.0-next-spec.4 associated with version 2.5.0-next-spec.4 on branch next-spec

And the reason was that there is no technical information semantic-release have no idea that the las tag is v2.5.0.

It is not possible to check why in previous releases we did not face this issue as logs on CI are not preserved that long.

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Now, problem is also when we merge changes from master to release branches. Then semantic-release treats these commits as part of the release, so then adds wrong comments to issues like #674

Possible solutions

The easiest is to drop the idea of long-living branches like next-spec and do as we did before, branches for a given release only that we remove after release. I see no benefit of long living branches, other than that we just do not have to create new branch for each release, but this can be delegated to GitHub workflow that will do it for us, and we anyway need to open update PRs asyncapi/parser-js#706

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