Creating a New Maintenance Branch

A new maintenance branch should be created from main. For example, if main is currently building 3.4 and we want to start work on 3.5, a 3.4.x maintenance branch must be created:

$ git checkout main
$ git checkout -b 3.4.x

Once the branch has been created, a number of changes must be made both on the new maintenance branch and on main.

On the new maintenance branch:

• Update latestVersion in gradle.properties to false

• Update the following, replacing main with the name of the new maintenance branch (for example 3.4.x):

  • Build status image and link URLs in README.adoc

  • GitHub Actions workflows to run on push to the new maintenance branch, rather than main:

    • build-and-deploy-snapshot.yml

    • ci.yml

    • run-system-tests.yml

    • trigger-docs-build.yml

On main:

• Update version in gradle.properties to m.n.0-SNAPSHOT (for example 3.5.0-SNAPSHOT)

• Update the following, aligning with the m.n.x milestone for the new version (for example "3.5.x"):

  • build-name of the Deploy step in .github/workflows/build-and-deploy-snapshot.yml

  • name and label attributes of Project in eclipse/spring-boot-project.setup

  • main_branch git/hooks/prepare-forward-merge

• Create a new spring-boot-project/spring-boot-tools/spring-boot-maven-plugin/src/main/xsd/layers-m.n.xsd file with identical contents to the previous version

• Update layers XML files beneath spring-boot-project/spring-boot-tools/spring-boot-maven-plugin/src/ to reference the new XSD. You can use a command similar to find spring-boot-project/spring-boot-tools/spring-boot-maven-plugin/src -type f | xargs grep -l layers-3.4.xsd to identify the files to change.

• Set bom.upgrade.policy in spring-boot-project/spring-boot-dependencies/build.gradle to same-major-version.