Create a Git branching and overall release strategy

[callmetango]

Describe the idea

We should have a reasonably acceptable and more or less easy-to-use branching and release strategy that describes:

1. What are the requirements imposed by the project context? Think development aspects like bigger refactorings and cross platform support, quality and security aspects, time-shifted inclusion in distributions and their long-term stabilty requirements, etc.
2. How and when to create longer maintained releases?
3. How many different releases are we going to maintain?
4. Where to fix bugs? In the lowest released version or latest on trunk?
5. How to bring the bug fixes to other released versions and the trunk?
6. How to name branches given we will use them?
7. When and how do we involve (manual) testing to green light a release? (Rough ideas are sufficient)
8. What steps need to be done on release?
9. What artifacts should at least be contained in a release?
   9.1 Where should the released source code be placed?
   9.2 Who needs to be informed and how? Think Releases · X11Libre/xserver, FreeLists / Discussion of the XLibre project, X11Libre Announcements · Discussions · GitHub, xserver/NEWS at master · X11Libre/xserver, maybe webhooks - GitHub Docs for our close package maintainers, ...
10. What versioning scheme are we going to use?
11. How do we plan for a release? Think milestones.

It should be done because

We need this strategy as a guideline for our contributors and maintainers. That way we reduce friction, give guidance and make developing for and contributing to XLibre more fun. We can strengthen trust by making it clear what to expect in terms of the development process and releases. Also we could reduce some effort by defining conventions for things and make them therefore easier to automate.

What are the alternatives?

No response

Additional context

The acceptance criterias were copied from Create a Git branching and overall release strategy · Issue #281 · X11Libre/misc and will be kept in sync if they are changed in the issue #281.

This discussion means to be a living document in the first comment. It will be updated as we progress, discuss and address ideas and concerns.

Extra fields

• I have checked the existing New Ideas, RFCs Of The Core Team, Ideas Soon To Be Addressed and Someday Ideas
• I have read the Contributing Guidelines
• I'd like to work on this idea

[callmetango]

FIXME Draft the strategy here.