> > I think this significantly underestimates the annoyance involved in renaming > > existing long-lived branches (in that all clients have to re-clone or > > manually adjust), which is certainly why I generally avoid doing so unless I > > absolutely have to. ... > This could even be something that gbp is aware of (maybe by a > configuration option which can be placed in gbp.conf, perhaps named > something like 'old-debian-branch') which it then warns the user about > when the two branch pointers aren't pointing at the same commit. Or > something like that.
This seems overly complicated. The simplest way forward if to finalize DEP-14, and let maintainers and packagers adopt it whenever they feel the benefit. You probably also want to wait a bit for tooling maintainers to default to what DEP-14 suggests. Regardless of what branch names packages use today or in the future, they should all have a debian/gbp.conf file that defines what branches and packaging practices are being used *right now*. Having a DEP-14 agreed will help that in the long-term the contents of those gbp.conf files will converge on the Debian-specific branch and tag names.
