A note from the maintainer

Since there seem to be many new people on the git list, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk about how git.git is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list.

The development is primarily done on this mailing list you are reading right now.

If you have patches, please send them to the list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

The list is available at various public sites as well:

	http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git
	http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git

Many active members of development community hang around on #git IRC channel as well. Its log is available at:

	http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_logs/git

[jc: Does anybody know a shortcut for "Today's" page on this
 site?  It irritates me having to click the latest link on this
 page to get to the latest]

* Repositories and branches.

My public git.git repository is at:

	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

It is mirrored at Pasky's repo.or.cz as well.

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man". The first one is meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a list so it is not as often updated as I would have liked. It also contains some helper scripts I use to maintain it.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at kernel.org at:

	http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The script to auto-maintain these two documentation branches are found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh script, if you are interested.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are reasonably tested and ready to be used in a production setting. There could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs but they are not expected to be anything major. Every now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits. The last such release was v1.4.3 done on Oct 18th.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from "master" at that point. Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from it. The maintenance releases are typically named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was v1.4.3.2 was done tonight. Usually new development will never go to this branch. This branch is also pulled into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master". A new development, either initiated by myself or more often you found your own itch to scratch, does not usually happen on "master", however. Instead, it is forked into a separate topic branch from the tip of "master", and first tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point. Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running ahead of "master" in git.git repository. I do not publish the tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need to worry about and primarily because I am lazy.

I judge the quality of topic branches, taking advices from the mailing list discussions. Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then with some more work (either by the original contributor or help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can now be tested by wider audience". Luckily, most of them start out in the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter category with "master". In general it should always contain the tip of "master". They may not be quite production ready, but are expected to work more or less without major breakage. I usually use "next" version of git for my own work. "next" is where new and exciting things take place.

The above three branches, "master", "maint" and "next" are never rewound, so you should be able to safely track them (that means the topics that have been merged into "next" are not rebased).

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches. The topic branches and "pu" are subject to rebasing in general. Especially "pu" is almost always rewound to the tip of "next" and reconstructed to contain the remaining topic branches. What this means is that immediately after cloning from git.git, it is advisable to mark "pu" in your remotes/origin that it does not necessarily fast-forwards, like this:

	$ cat .git/remotes/origin
        URL: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
        Pull: refs/heads/master:refs/heads/origin
        Pull: refs/heads/maint:refs/heads/maint
        Pull: refs/heads/next:refs/heads/next
        Pull: +refs/heads/pu:refs/heads/pu

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it graduates to "next". This is done by:

	git checkout next
        git pull . that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so hot and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is _expected_ to be tweaked and fixed to perfection before it is merged to "master". It is done by:

	git checkout master
        git pull . that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

However, being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release (being in "master" _is_ such a guarantee), or even in _any_ future release. There even was a case that a topic needed a few reverting before graduating to "master".