Deprecating dev branch soon!

[jdangerx]

We are moving towards trunk-based development, which means that we will be doing all of our development based on the main branch. This simplifies many development and automation workflows, which is good! However, it does mean some disruption to your workflows, sorry.

This will happen in the next couple of weeks - once the tooling (a first pass is in #3164, but I'm sure we'll have to work out a few kinks) works we'll have a firm timeline for deprecating the dev branch.

• You will no longer be able to push to dev! Open PRs should be switched to the main branch instead.
• If you currently install PUDL from the dev branch, that will no longer get updates! Pin to one of the following options:
  • main will be the closest analog to dev going forwards - the bleeding edge.
  • stable will be the latest numbered version - we're hoping to get to a quarterly or monthly cadence here, so it should be fairly up-to-date.
  • vXXXX.XX.XX will be a specific numbered version - if you want to stay really stable.
• if you have links to our documentation that point at /en/dev, they will no longer be updated - use /en/latest or /en/stable instead.

After deprecation, we will delete the branch after a few months and the things that are "not updated" will be "gone."

[zaneselvans]

Another place this change will show up is in the nightly build outputs that get pushed to S3 and GCS, currently with URLs like:

• s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/dev/pudl.sqlite.gz

Which will stop getting updated, eventually get removed, and be replaced with something like...

• s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/nightly/pudl.sqlite.gz (the last nightly build that succeeded; will be updated most mornings)
• s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/stable/pudl.sqlite.gz (the last versioned release; will update monthly to quarterly)
• s3://pudl.catalyst.coop/v2023.12.01/pudl.sqlite.gz (a specific versioned release, whose contents should not subsequently change)

[zaneselvans]

Hey y'all, through #3140, #3212, #3216 we have now deprecated the dev branch. We now have 3 long-term branches:

• main is the default branch, which we branch off of and make PRs into. Code there has been reviewed and passed CI, but may or may not result in successful nightly builds. This is bleeding edge and really just meant for develoment.
• nightly will always point at the commit associated with the last successful nightly builds. It's updated automatically and should never be pushed to. For now this will also be the default version for our documentation, Kaggle dataset, and Datasette deployment.
• stable will always point at the commit associated with the last versioned software & data release. It's also updated automatically and should never be pushed to.