Git development branches

[naderman]

Hey all,

I think our current branch names are not very clear and meaningful to new or short term contributors and make it more difficult for them to address pull requests correctly. I just changed our default branch back to develop-ascraeus as a lot of bugfix PRs were accidentally made against develop although they were meant for 3.1.x. Currently we use the following branches:

• develop-olympus - Development version of 3.0.x
• develop-ascraeus - Development version of 3.1.x
• develop - Latest development version
• qa - contains the latest qa release, currently still on 3.0.x releases
• master - contains the latest stable release, currently still on 3.0.x releases
• qa-olympus - doesn't actually exist, but was supposed to be created once qa switched to 3.1
• master-olympus - doesn't actually exist, but was supposed to be created once master switched to 3.1

In line with other PHP projects (this proposal is also compatible with composer's branch version detection), I suggest we rename / reorganize these branches to the following:

• 3.0.x - Development of version 3.0.x
• 3.1.x - Development of version 3.1.x
• master - Latest development version

I propose that we drop the master/qa branches as I imagine most people wanting to use a particular version would be using tags anyway.

If we consider it to be a problem to repurpose master that drastically, we could keep master around with a similar purpose to the current one and continue to use develop for the latest version. I would however prefer to switch it over fully.

Let me know what you think.

[nickvergessen]

+1, we had quite some questions "which branch is 3.1" latly on github

[Marc]

+1

This should especially help with reducing any confusion for new contributors.
As already mentioned on irc, we might even think not using any .x suffix. 3.0 and 3.1 have the same meaning as 3.0.x and 3.1.x.

[MattF]

+1 I'm all for better branch names.

My only concern is for the extensions that clone the develop-ascraeus branch for phpunit testing. They will have their testing platform disrupted by this change, until obviously they update to clone the new 3.1.x branch.

[nickvergessen]

My only concern is for the extensions that clone the develop-ascraeus branch for phpunit testing. They will have their testing platform disrupted by this change, until obviously they update to use the new 3.1.x branch.

Well we can keep the old develop-* branches around for quite sometime, until stuff is fixed.

[MattF]

My only concern is for the extensions that clone the develop-ascraeus branch for phpunit testing. They will have their testing platform disrupted by this change, until obviously they update to use the new 3.1.x branch.

Well we can keep the old develop-* branches around for quite sometime, until stuff is fixed.

Perhaps but that might confuse some contributors who are used to working off develop-ascraeus too

I'd rather not keep the old one around, and just be aware that some ext authors might be wondering why their testing broke for a few weeks

[naderman]

Yeah I think tests are something we can live with breaking though and it's not like that'll be particularly difficult to fix.

As per IRC I would keep the .x suffixes on the branches to make it clear they refer to the branch and not a particular release.

[advocatus]

+1

I don't use Github for development, but I support any initiative to streamline.

[Senky]

+1

[Nicofuma]

+1