Allow assigning a version to the main branch / feature branches in a more easy way

[moses70]

Improve version sources so that builds from the main branch can have a proper ALPHA-version without breaking release branches
I find it very difficult to assign a version to the main branch without affecting any release branches.
Often, the release branches are "inheriting" all version tags from the main branch and in the end the release gets a wrong version.
There should be a way to set a version source for only one branch and block any impact to other branches.

Detailed Description / Context

In git, all branches go eventually back to the same origin.
For release branches especially, I want to be able to create a new branch from main any time. So when I have a tag "3.0-alpha" in my main branch, all derived release branches will see this tag also.

But my release branch "release/2.2" should use yield a version "2.2-beta" based on the branch name.
The only way to achieve this now is to make sure that the "3.0-alpha" tag does not show up in the release branch's history. Otherwise it will take precendence.

I understand that the "next-version" configuration setting could help here. But unfortunately, the "next-version" seems to have precence over the branch name as a version source. So it does not seem to be a way.

Possible Implementation

On solution could be to let the "branch name" version source have precence over "next-version".
I guess this would be a breaking change so maybe activate this behavior with a new config option?

Another way would be to allow "next-version" to be branch-specific.
Or one could thing about making "tag-prefix" branch-specific, which would allow to restrict visiblity a special version tag only to main and feature-branches.

[asbjornu]

Can you please share your GitVersion.yml configuration?

[moses70]

Hi asbjornu,

this is my configuration:

assembly-versioning-scheme: MajorMinorPatchTag
mode: ContinuousDeployment
branches:
  release:
    increment: Patch
  main:
    tag: alpha
ignore:
  sha: []
merge-message-formats: {}

[moses70]

Hi asbjornu,

thank you for your first feedback to this topic.
Is my description and suggestion understandable to you?

[asbjornu]

What happens if you set source-branches to [] (an empty list) for your release branches?

[moses70]

Hi asbornu,

Thank you, that sounds reasonable! Just tried it out:

The result is not what I wanted yet, because the tag "3.0-alpha" from the "main" branch is still taking precendence over the branch name "release/2.8". I expected that the tag from main would be ignored completely.

  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:80] Fallback base version: 0.1.0 with commit count source 5c5a3ee51e63b083c165b223f1af3b02722216bf
  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:86] Git tag '3.0-alpha': 3.0.0-alpha with commit count source f1a774b0611600797783714e57565e1b43c4d209
  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:86] Begin: Finding branch source of 'release/2.8'
  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:88] End: Finding branch source of 'release/2.8' (Took: 18.78ms)
  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:88] Version in branch name: 2.8.0 with commit count source External Source
  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:91] Found multiple base versions which will produce the same SemVer (3.0.0-alpha), taking oldest source for commit counting (Git tag '3.0-alpha')
  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:91] Base version used: Git tag '3.0-alpha': 3.0.0-alpha with commit count source f1a774b0611600797783714e57565e1b43c4d209
  INFO [08/18/22 13:32:53:91] End: Calculating base versions (Took: 128.35ms)

My new configuration is:

assembly-versioning-scheme: MajorMinorPatchTag
mode: ContinuousDeployment
branches:
  release:
    increment: Patch
    source-branches: []
  main:
    tag: alpha
ignore:
  sha: []
merge-message-formats: {}

The new option is definitely an improvement because the
" Multiple source branches have been found, picking the first one (main)." warning went away.

Is there a way to achieve the behavior that I want, or would you suggest to use another approach?

[moses70]

After some more tests, I found a promising approach:

I realized that I want to have my "main" branch to act more like a "develop" branch. So I added this:

And I removed the "3.0-alpha" tag from main (and all other old version tags because they dont belong there anyways).
Because I already have a "release/2.0" and a "release/2.1" branch, I end up with "3.0-alpha" in main which is what I want.

What do you think?

[asbjornu]

Sounds good!

[HHobeck]

Okay that means GitVersion has already all configuration option on board to fullfill your requirements right? I'm going to close this issue. Please give me a feedback if you are not agree.

Please notice you can use the new workflow feature to write your custom workflow from scratch: #3305

Cheers.