[icu-announce] ICU Source Repository: Removing the "latest" git tag

[Jeff Genovy]

Dear friends and users of ICU,

When the ICU source repository was migrated from Subversion (SVN) to git, a "latest" tag was created, in order to match the equivalent "latest" tag that existed in the SVN repo.

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/releases/tag/latest

However, the creation of this tag was a mistake, as updating this tag requires force-pushing to the public git repo, which modifies the history of the repository.
Additionally, the current "latest" tag is 2 years out of date and points to ICU 63.1, which was released in Oct 2018.

Since it is not possible to maintain a "latest" tag in a public git repository without modifying history the "latest" tag will be deleted from the public ICU source repository.

For users which used the "latest" tag to download and/or clone the most up-to-date release (for example, in a build script), an alternative method exists instead.
The following command line will clone the most current non pre-release version of ICU from the public repository:

    git clone --depth 1 --branch `curl $1 -s -L -I -o /dev/null -w '%{url_effective}' https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/releases/latest | xargs basename` https://github.com/unicode-org/icu.git

This can be used as a direct replacement for cloning from the "latest" tag.

Best Regards,

Jeff Genovy for the ICU Project