When testing against the previous 5.x release, the bwc project incorrectly would checkout the 5.x
branch instead of the 5.5 branch as it still had the logic that applies for major versions bwc. This change adds
a check to compare the major version when making the decision on the branch to use.
Removes the `distribution:bwc` project in favor of
`distribution:bwc-release-snapshot` and
`distribution:bwc-stable-snapshot`.
`distribution:bwc-release-snapshot` builds a snapshot of the
latest release branch (5.4 now) if needed for backwards
compatibility. `distribution:bwc-stable-snapshot` builds a
snapshot of the latest stable branch (5.x now) if needed for
backwards compatibility.
Some packaging tests depend on snapshot versions of packaging
distributions yet the build does not use a repository that includes such
distributions. While we could add such a repository, a better strategy
is to follow our approach for other BWC tests where we depend on a
locally-compiled archive distribution. This commit adds a local
compilation of packaging artifacts and substitutes these anywhere that
we would otherwise depend on a snapshot of these artifacts.
Relates #24861
jaymode
Nik Everett
Jason Tedor