Comment 4 for bug 995604

I've thrown together a rudimentary proof-of-concept implementation of your symbolic-ref idea ( https://review.openstack.org/13928 ) and it seems to work as expected given the caveats above. I agree, however, with James E. Blair's concern that this will be either confusing or useless to downstream consumers since the reference is seen as a branch outside of the local copy on the Gerrit server. I'm also worried that zuul will act on changes it sees in these independently of the real branches they represent and, unless modified to ignore them explicitly by name, duplicate testing activities as a result.

In IRC he suggested constantly updating tags instead, so I've tested doing this with lightweight tags on my development Gerrit VM and it seems to fit the bill. A client can pull from a tag name instead of a branch name and will get the commit from the branch to which the tag refers, even if the tag has updated to point at a commit on a new branch since the last pull.

Given that there's at least one discussion proposed for ODS around reorganizing the branch structure and release branching process, further development on a solution should be postponed until we've got a clear picture of how things may change in that regard.