[PATCH for discussion] release.sh: autodetect current and previous tags

[Alan Coopersmith]

Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
> On Sep 24, 2010, at 12:18, Gaetan Nadon wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 2010-09-24 at 11:21 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>>
>>> +Usage: `basename $0` [options] <section> [<tag_previous>
>>> [<tag_current>]]
>>> +Usage: `basename $0` [options] <section> initial [<tag_current>]
>>
>> Can there be a safeguard to prevent accidental release with the "no
>> tags" usage?
>> Today, having both tags correct may be a pain, but act as such a
>> safeguard.
>> Making it easier sometimes implies making it more dangerous.
>> Perhaps an option such as --auto-tags.
>>
>> Are there instructions on what to do in case of an accidental release?
>> It seems easy to forget to run distcheck and upload a wrong tarball.
> 
> What happened to this?  Auto detection seems useful.  If you're worried about accidental releaes, why not just have a "Is this correct? [y/N]" after auto detecting?

Well, I've now used it dozens of times (maybe even hundreds, I've lost
count, but the xorg-announce archives would have it) - it was especially
nice when churning out the font releases since they aren't all the same
version numbers - some have had an extra rev, and a few a minor version
bump when new characters were added.

I have however never used it on the xserver with it's multiple branches,
or on anything where I wasn't releasing the master branch.

I was thinking that a prompt like you suggest before doing any actual
pushes/uploads would be the way to go, but didn't yet think it hard
enough to cause my fingers to type it.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System