I am helping to improve onboarding documentation for Moodle plugin authors and this will help us.

The current active branches on git are listed at:

https://github.com/moodle/moodle/branches/active

I would please like to ask that a new branch be added and maintained:

`MOODLE_LATEST_STABLE`

And this would track (today) `MOODLE_405_STABLE` but later it would track other future stable branches.

Then everybody should use this in their documentation as the canonical way to "get the latest Moodle from git".

—

1. Impact

Today, this is the simplest correct way to instruct people how to get Moodle from git:

> 1. Visit https://moodledev.io/general/releases to find what is the latest release.
> 2. Format that like `MOODLE_405_STABLE` if the latest version is 4.5.
> 3. Update and run this command, substituting in the branch name: `git clone -b BRANCH_NAME git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git $MOODLE_DOCKER_WWWROOT`, and remember! you must substitute and not just keep the word `BRANCH_NAME` there!

Instead this would be much simpler:

> 1. Run this command
> ```sh
> git clone -b MOODLE_CURRENT_STABLE git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git

Many, many projects are currently using incorrect and outdated instructions like this:

> Install the latest version of Moodle with
> ```sh
> git clone -b MOODLE_401_STABLE git://git.moodle.org/moodle.git
> ```

and that instruction is never updated, or it is updated not immediately when it should be.

The end result is that new developers can be confused. Everybody needs to spend more time than necessary getting the latest versions. Hundreds (thousands?) of project documentations need to be updated when there is a new Moodle release.

You can find some of them [with a GitHub search](https://github.com/search?q=%22MOODLE_401_STABLE%22&type=repositories&ref=advsearch) for `MOODLE_401_STABLE`. And then do each of these other versions.