I have really dropped the ball with tagging appliance build code releases. We used to do it ages ago, but it's been a long time now... I intend to get back to doing that within the lifetime of v19.x.

To summarize & paraphrase a comment by @l-arnold elsewhere - #1831 (comment):

Having separate build code branches and/or tags is a good and useful thing!

My plan moving forward is:

• continue to tag our custom software repo releases - e.g. confconsole, fab, etc. (as a general rule we won't maintain separate branches)
• continue to have separate major version branches for TKLDev components - e.g. "common" - this supports users who wish to develop older TKL app major versions on older TKLDev releases.
• (re)implement release tags for individual appliance build code repos.

I'm not going to commit to tagging common (and other components) for each individual appliance release. However a middle ground would be to publish the full build environment that was used for each appliance release. Stuff like:

• package versions (we already do this to some degree - but only for TurnKey and Debian packages - not third party ones)
• commit ID of TKLDev components - e.g. common, buildtasks, etc.
• exact upstream software versions - e.g. commit id for software cloned via git or downloaded filename/version in the case of zip/tarball installs. We already do that to some extent, but it's somewhat ad-hoc - and it's often done by me manually.

I'll add "generating (and publishing) improved build env info" to my backlog for action ASAP.