ACE/TAO/MPC mismatch between CI testing and release

[jwillemsen]

I noticed that the CI uses the ace6tao2 branch for ACE/TAO and master for MPC, but the release is using the latest officially released versions, so the CI tests now something else than the user uses, the OpenDDS 3.28 release uses 6.5.20 which is from June 28, 2023 which is 135 commits behind the ace6tao2 ACE/TAO branch (see DOCGroup/ACE_TAO@ACE+TAO-6_5_20...ace6tao2), and 53 commits behind the MPC branch (DOCGroup/MPC@ACE+TAO-6_5_20...master)

[jrw972]

So, is the answer to introduce an ACE/TAO build that uses a release archive or a build that uses a release tag from git with a corresponding tag from MPC?

[jwillemsen]

I would like to propose that most CI builds use a released ACE/TAO/MPC version tag, they test what our users would also use and focus on the OpenDDS code.

In addition setup a few builds using the ace6tao2 and master ACE/TAO/MPC braches to make sure that any changes there doesn’t break OpenDDS, I do the same with AXCIOMA

[jrw972]

Adopting and implementing this policy should address this issue.