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 after release of NetBeans IDE (Swing app) when VOTE is closed and final commit in release branch is known.