Creating a branch for ATF pre-release code

["Julio M. Merino Vidal" <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello,

[ Please CC me any replies ]

As I am having this problem now and will certainly have it again in
the future, I would like to ask for suggestions here on how to
proceed.

I am very close to being able to release ATF 0.6.  The thing is that
the current codebase works fine under NetBSD, so I could just publish
it right now and import the sources into the NetBSD tree.  However, I
haven't had the time to make sure this release works well in several
other platforms yet, so I cannot (read, don't want to) do the official
release right now.  This forces me to keep lots of unversioned local
changes to the NetBSD tree until I can do the release, import it, and
then commit everything at once.

A solution to mitigate the maintenance problem for me would be to
create a branch in which I can import pre-release code of ATF into the
NetBSD source tree.  This way I could make sure the new code works
well under NetBSD easily and we could keep history of how things are
going.  This could also allow me to test the same changes on different
build hosts and, of course, allow other people to easily test the new
code before it's officially released.

Additionally, a branch could permit easier reorganization of tests
(migration from regress to tests).  Specially because implementing
some tests often benefits from changes to the ATF code base, but these
new tests need to be held back until the changes are pushed into ATF
and the next formal release is imported.  This forces me (or others,
as was the case for Lukasz, the GSoC student working on ATF) to keep
even more local changes than desired.

Do you think opening a branch for this would be a good idea?

How should I manage the branch?  I mean, I could start creating one
now in preparation for 0.6.  What happens when I want to do the same
thing for 0.7?  Do I reuse the branch name (e.g. jmmv-atf) or create
another one (e.g. jmmv-atf-0.7) for each release?

Thanks,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost>