## How we determine the channel name
Historically, we used the current branch's upstream to figure out the current channel name. I have no idea why. I traced it back to https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pull/446/files where @abarth implement this and I reviewed that PR and left no comment on it at the time.
I think this is confusing. You can be on a branch and it tells you that your channel is different. That seems weird.
This PR changes the logic to uses the current branch as the channel name.
## How we display channels
The main reason this PR exists is to add channel descriptions to the `flutter channel` list:
```
ianh@burmese:~/dev/flutter/packages/flutter_tools$ flutter channel
Flutter channels:
master (tip of tree, for contributors)
main (tip of tree, follows master channel)
beta (updated monthly, recommended for experienced users)
stable (updated quarterly, for new users and for production app releases)
* foo_bar
Currently not on an official channel.
ianh@burmese:~/dev/flutter/packages/flutter_tools$
```
## Other changes
I made a few other changes while I was at it:
* If you're not on an official channel, we used to imply `--show-all`, but now we don't, we just show the official channels plus yours. This avoids flooding the screen in the case the user is on a weird channel and just wants to know what channel they're on.
* I made the tool more consistent about how it handles unofficial branches. Now it's always `[user branch]`.
* I slightly adjusted how unknown versions are rendered so it's clearer the version is unknown rather than just having the word "Unknown" floating in the output without context.
* Simplified some of the code.
* Made some of the tests more strict (checking all output rather than just some aspects of it).
* Changed the MockFlutterVersion to implement the FlutterVersion API more strictly.
* I made sure we escape the output to `.metadata` to avoid potential injection bugs (previously we just inlined the version and channel name verbatim with no escaping, which is super sketchy).
* Tweaked the help text for the `downgrade` command to be clearer.
* Removed some misleading text in some error messages.
* Made the `.metadata` generator consistent with the template file.
* Removed some obsolete code to do with the `dev` branch.
## Reviewer notes
I'm worried that there are implications to some of these changes that I am not aware of, so please don't assume I know what I'm doing when reviewing this code. :-)
Our current top crasher is an unclear error when ProcessManager fails to resolve an executable path. To fix this, we'd like to being adjusting the process resolution logic and adding more instrumentation to track failures. In order to begin the process, the ProcessManager has been folded back into the flutter tool
This class is entirely superseded by the application package factory. Only drive and install use it, and removing it from drive will allow use-application-binary support.
