From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:30:31 GMT
Subject: Re: Reference for git.git release process
Message-ID: <7viqlxz9go.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <49CA78BF.2020101@fastmail.fm>

Raman Gupta <rocketraman@fastmail.fm> writes:

> One question about the dev process:
>
> 1) I don't see any topic branches available in git.git. Are these
> generally kept in a private repo and/or shared between individual
> developer's public repositories?

I do not answer "generally" part, but in git.git, I do not publish heads
of individual topic branches.  I could, but simply I don't, because that
has been the way I've operated so far, and I am too lazy to change my
configuration.  Also I suspect it would make my life more cumbersome
because I have to prune stale topics from the public repositories from
time to time.

> Some questions about the release process:
>
> 1) After a release is made (master is tagged with vX.Y.Z), is the
> maint branch deleted and recreated from the new release tag? e.g.
>
> git branch -d maint
> git branch maint master

It is rather:

        git checkout maint
        git merge master

which should be the same because the merge should fast-forward, but an
advantage is that it would keep the reflog of 'maint'.

In addition, you can keep older maintenance track around, i.e.

	git branch maint-X.Y.(Z-1) maint
        git checkout maint
        git merge master

so that maintenance releases for even older codebase _could_ be issued
_if_ necessary.

> 2) MaintNotes states:
>
> "After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will
> be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics"
>
> Does this mean:
>
> git branch -d next
> git checkout -b next master
> git merge ai/topic1_to_cook_in_next
> git merge ai/topic2_to_cook_in_next

That is more-or-less correct, even though I'd actually do either

	git branch -f next master

or

	git checkout next
        git reset --hard master

instead of deleting and recreating.