Maintain branches based on Bitcoin Core stable releases about namecoin-core

[domob1812]

Yes, that's possible - but it would, of course, increase the maintenance effort required for merging patches. Furthermore, I think we should aim to have a branch that is "stable" (well-tested) in general, not just with respect to upstream Bitcoin and still the newest Namecoin patches.

My own opinion since I started with Namecoin Core was that we should eventually start to do our own releases and release branches. They could roughly be based on Bitcoin releases, but need not be. Basically, we would branch off at some point, declare a release canditate, encourage people to test it, not further merge "bleeding edge" patches to the branch, and release it as official version as soon as it has been running in the tests for some time without issues.

We could start a branch right now - although, of course, everyone will have to upgrade again when we do the final hard fork getting rid of Namecoin 0.3.80.

[JeremyRand]

@domob1812 So, there are a couple of orthogonal issues here, I think. Regarding having a stable branch for Namecoin-specific things, yes, I think we should do that. However, I also think we should take advantage of the huge amount of QA testing that goes into Bitcoin, by basing our end user releases on Bitcoin releases. If we don't do that, then that means we have to take over the task of doing QA testing of Bitcoin commits, which is both a lot of work and also totally duplicative of Bitcoin developers' work.

So, I guess I would lean toward having these branches:

1. bitcoin-master (same as Bitcoin's master branch).
2. bitcoin-master-namecoin-master (Bitcoin master with Namecoin's latest dev commits)
3. bitcoin-stable (same as Bitcoin release)
4. bitcoin-stable-namecoin-master (Latest Namecoin dev commits, Bitcoin stable)
5. bitcoin-stable-namecoin-stable (Namecoin release, based on Bitcoin stable with stable Namecoin commits)

(Of course we would also have the auxpow branches.)

The merge flow would be something like:

1. bitcoin-master and bitcoin-stable come from Bitcoin, without changes by us.
2. bitcoin-stable-namecoin-master accepts pull requests from Namecoin contributors, and merges from bitcoin-master-namecoin-master whenever Bitcoin makes a new stable release (meaning it gets all the Namecoin commits ported to the new Bitcoin stable from bitcoin-master-namecoin-master).
3. bitcoin-master-namecoin-master merges from bitcoin-master and bitcoin-stable-namecoin-master, porting any Namecoin commits to bitcoin-master as necessary.
4. bitcoin-stable-namecoin-stable merges from bitcoin-stable-namecoin-master whenever Namecoin makes a new stable release.

The "stable" label could also be replaced by specific versions, so that each major release gets its own branch (which lets us make beta releases from the stable branch before an official release).

Thoughts?

[domob1812]

We already have this now. Currently, the "stable" branch of Namecoin Core is 0.16, and I update it regularly with upstream changes to Bitcoin Core's 0.16 branch. (By own repo, https://github.com/domob1812/namecore also has bitcoin-0.16 and auxpow-0.16 branches corresponding to bitcoin and auxpow.) When Bitcoin branches 0.17, I will track that instead.