Proposal

When being discussed on dev@ mailing list and on Slack channels there seems to be a need to separate VSNetBeans from main NetBeans code base and also from releases.

NetBeans IDE and VSNetBeans releases could be decoupled.

• VSNetBeans will be built and hosted in a new repository, netbeans-vscode
• netbeans-vscode repository will contain the content of the current java/java.lsp.server/vscode and java/java.lsp.server/nbcode    
  
  • The main NetBeans repository would be included as a sub-module.
• Releasing VSNetBeans 
  • Create a branch in netbeans-vscode  named release_X.Y.Z where X is the main release version of existing NetBeans IDE
  • The submodule with main NetBeans source code is changed to checkout a specific hash from the main NetBeans repository.
  • Build VSNetBeans, test it and perform regular ASF NetBeans voting on sources and complimentary binary
  • There would not be a need to do tags or branches in the main repository. In the worst case, there could be backports in the form of patches in the netbeans-vsnetbeans repository, although it would be better to avoid those.
• Release of VSNetBeans is done
  • For JDK releases as source code and VSIX artifacts.
  • After release of NetBeans IDE (Swing app) when VOTE is closed and final commit in release branch is known. Then submodule with main NetBeans repository will be updated to checkout this commit.