Using Branch instead of Tags about teaching-app-dev-swift

[bishalg]

Also we should use "Labels" and "Milestone" of Github in issue tracker so that we can filter the issue by type.

[ybakos]

Thanks for the suggestions! I am going to leave the labels and milestones empty for now because there just aren't that many issues. (In other words, I'll add them when it starts to become worth it.)

Regarding the branches, I hear you. On the one hand, it is just as easy to check out a tag as it is a branch. However, I definitely think you are on to something, because using branches may make maintaining the changes we make to each lesson easier.

Right now, if I rebase to make changes to a particular tag, I have to delete and recreate each tag since rebasing changes the commit history but doesn't update the corresponding tags without some manual work (example.

Let me think about this, and practice this strategy with a deployment repo I have.

[ybakos]

I've now investigated this quite a bit, and while it seems at first like a better approach. It isn't. The problem arises when changes are made in earlier commits that would then force a rebase of all child branches. Unfortunately, when rebasing each branch off the new parent HEADs, we get merge conflicts for all subsequent commits.

With a single branch, we can make an earlier change in the history, and just do an interactive rebase. When replaying the history over the earlier change, we don't have to manually handle the differences per each commit in the original history.

In other words, having a single branch timeline (on master), and rebasing/rewinding/playing back on top of the changes on that one branch are far more sane that having to rebase multiple branches.

The tradeoff is that, once the history is rewritten, we have to manually delete and recreate the tags. But that doesn't require much thinking, whereas dealing with merge conflicts across multiple rebased branches does.

[ybakos]

However... the problem with tags is that we have to rewrite the history - which is terrible.

So, in fact, using branches really is the way to go. It doesn't provide a magic solution to managing the changing lessons, but it is a better long-term solution to managing the lesson projects.

When we want to change the commits that represent a particular lesson, we simply check out that branch, and make the changes. We have to manually apply those same changes to each subsequent branch. For example, if I make a code change in branch lesson04, then I have to make sure that the code in all subsequent branches (e.g. lesson05, lesson06, etc) reflect those changes too.

[ybakos]

I've deprecated all tags in favor of branches.