svn branches

[asotirov at determina.com (Alexander Sotirov)]

H D Moore wrote:
> The trunk is the development branch, the 3.0 tag is the stable branch. All 
> stable downloads of 3.0 use the 3.0 tag for online updates via 
> Subversion. I realize this is non-standard (where tags are used to mark 
> releases and branches are used to maintain a version), but with the 
> tarballs of the original release available, I don't see any problem using 
> the tags this way.
>
> Changes in the 3.1-dev tree (trunk), including exploits, are merged to the 
> 3.0 tag once they are tested. Once the 3.1 release is completed, users 
> will be able to do a version-upgrade with a subversion command (either 
> svn switch or just by checking out the new tag and replacing the old).

Cool, thanks for explaining that. I was confused by your use of the tag instead
of a branch, but it makes sense now. Can't you tag the initial 3.0 revision with
a "3.0-rel" tag? This way users can checkout the that tag and build a tarball
that's identical to the released one, while the "3.0" tag will include all new
exploits.

I think it's better to avoid merging changes other than new exploits (and maybe
some code that the exploits need) on the 3.0 branch. I have some automation
that's used for testing some of our protection stuff, and every time the
framework changes I'll have to run a complete set of tests and look for
brokenness. I'd rather do this only once when 3.1 is released rather than every
other day when some random change gets merged from 3.1-dev.

Btw, we should talk sometime about using my testing system for regression
testing of the framework, I think I've mentioned that before.

Alex