As it can be seen, tags have an important role in the SwatFlow Workflow and are essential to having short-lived branches.
The tags can be separated into 2 different categories:
- Version Tags: are created at the end of a release or hotfix branch and denote a specific release with proper major.minor.path values (ex. 1.1.4)
- Maintenance Tags: are created/updated when a release/hotfix tag is created and only denotes a specific major.minor category (ex. 1.1)
Version Tags
Version tags have the purpose of denoting a proper release and are used to uniquely identify a release/hotfix.
It is a static tag, which should never be changed.
Once a release has been tagged, it cannot be modified in any way.
The only option is to create an additional tag through the hotfix process.
Maintenance Tags
Maintenance tags have the symbolic function of pointing to the most recent release of a major.minor release group.
Because of this, they cannot be static and will always be updated with a new release/tag in the corresponding major.minor release group.
Because of it's dynamic nature, a maintenance tag should never be used in deployments. It's role is solely in the maintenance of a given major.minor release group.
If an issue is reported in a given version major.minor.patch version, a developer would need to provide the fix on the latest release of the corresponding major.minor group, if the issue is still reproducible