Dear all, As you know, at the end of this quarter we will be releasing gem5-19, the first official release of gem5. As part of this release we'd like to change our git branching structure. Therefore, I'm writing to ask for feedback on what we have planned and whether it can be improved upon.
We'd like to have a git repo structure similar to that used in gitflow development: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model . I've seen this model work well before, as it has some worthwhile abstractors for public, open source git projects with regular releases. What I'd like to incorporate from this model is the following: - Two permanent branches: master and develop. - "develop" would function as master does now. This would be the main point in which changes are applied between gem5 releases. - Upon a new release of gem5, the develop branch would be merged into master and a new git tag added to master indicating the release version. Ergo, the master branch would always contain the latest release of gem5. - If a quick hotfix is needed, a new "hotfix" branch would be created and merged into both the develop and master branches upon completion. This would also require a new tag on the master branch. (I suggest using the standard "Version [Major].[Minor].[Hotfix]" version numbering system. I.e., the first version would be V19.0.0, a hotfix to this would make it V19.0.1, and a minor release would make it V19.1.0). - The creation of feature branches would be permitted. These branches would encapsulate the gradual development of large features (i.e., ones carried out over many commits). When complete a feature branch would be merged into the develop branch. They'd be no obligation to use feature branches though we believe they could be of value in certain cases. For example, if a developer wishes to postpone a developed feature for a given gem5 release (e.g., something more suited for a major release rather than a minor one), then they could submit their changes as a feature branch and wait to merge to the develop branch at a later date. I believe this setup would make our development process run smoother and give gem5 users more stability. Day-to-day development wouldn't change much as committing to the develop branch would work in the same way as submitting to master does now. If anyone has any thoughts about this, I'd be happy to hear from you. Kind regards, Bobby -- Dr. Bobby R. Bruce Room 2235, Kemper Hall, UC Davis Davis, CA, 95616 _______________________________________________ gem5-dev mailing list gem5-dev@gem5.org http://m5sim.org/mailman/listinfo/gem5-dev
