Branch naming

[rarkins]

Currently we name like upgrade/angular and upgrade/angular-major, where angular is an example package name. Is this OK?

[rarkins]

I can see that people might like a configurable prefix, e.g. name it as renovate/angular instead of upgrade/angular. This would be a nice-to-have feature.

A more important question is whether to add versions to the branch names, e.g. upgrade/angular-1.6.0 instead of upgrade/angular or upgrade/angular-2.1.0 instead of upgrade/angular-major.

I think that using exact versions in branch names is problematic because renaming branches is usually not advised, and I don't want a branch confusingly remaining named upgrade/angular-1.6.0 if actually the version is later bumped to 1.6.1.

So then the question is whether to name as current (upgrade/angular and upgrade/angular-major) or use major numbers in the branch, e.g. upgrade/angular-1.x and upgrade/angular-2.x. Perhaps upgrade/angular and upgrade/angular-2.x is another consideration. Most packages will receive probably 10x or more minor/patch upgrades than major ones, so that is the typical use case.

[rarkins]

Other considerations:

Does the naming scheme cause problems or confusion at the moment a project upgrades their master branch to a next major version?

For example, if you used the upgrade/angular branch for minor upgrades and updated the project to angular 2.1.0, then a week later when angular 2.2.0 is released then our script would make that update into the upgrade/angular branch if it still existed - is that desired? If we use the major release branch naming then we wouldn't have that problem.

What if there's more than one major version?

e.g. let's say a project remains on angular 1.x and so the script is maintaining branches/PRs for both 1.x and 2.x, but then the next angular major version is released (which happens to be 4.0 as they are skipping 3.0). Would the user want us to maintain 3 parallel upgrade branches, or just two? If we use naming like upgrade/angular-2.x then we'd default to 3 branches, but could also give the users options.

[rarkins]

Based on the above, I'm leaning towards a branch naming convention of upgrade/angular-1.x, upgrade/angular-2.x, etc. The PRs themselves can have their names updated to reflect exact versions, e.g. upgrade/angular-1.x can have the PR title "Upgrade angular to version 1.6.0"