GitHub development

[SiNNuT]

Up until recently the dev branch was way behind master. Lately, new stuff is added to the dev branch, and i think rightly so.

Can we expect master to be pretty much the stable/production branch? Dev and possibly other branches for new stuff?

[teppo]

That pretty much sums up how it works with most (if not all) GitHub projects and ProcessWire is no different in this aspect. It's a good idea (even necessity for a large project like PW) to have dev branch for new and possibly unstable features.. although, as we all know, when it comes to producing code of superb quality Ryan is a true ninja

[SiNNuT]

I know teppo, but not until long ago the master branch was actually ahead of the dev branch in terms of code and features most of the times.

So i was just wondering if we can now assume that master is 'stable' / production ready branch and that all new stuff goes via dev first.

[ryan]

You are too kind Teppo. I'm no ninja on that front -- I break as much stuff as I create. But I do try and account for that as much as I can... if I've been adding stuff that I know has potential to break things or result in any potential behavior change, I put it in the dev branch. If I'm adding code contributed by others, I'll put that in the dev branch. But if I'm updating stuff that is unlikely to break anything for anyone (especially bug fixes), then I'll put it in the master branch. Once I've been running on the dev branch myself for awhile without issue, then I'll try to get some other people to test it out, and if all is good, it gets merged into the master (along with a minor version number bump).

I still consider myself kind of a novice with GitHub, so am slowly learning the right workflow here. But as time goes on, I hope to be using as many best practices here as possible.

I know teppo, but not until long ago the master branch was actually ahead of the dev branch in terms of code and features most of the times.

So far I've not been using the dev branch when it comes to more minor stuff. If I don't have something big going on (i.e. stuff that needs more testing), then I'm not really using the dev branch. But I will try to be more consistent with a consistent workflow that predictably goes from dev to master.

I know teppo, but not until long ago the master branch was actually ahead of the dev branch in terms of code and features most of the times.

This isn't the way it should be, it's just me not being a Git expert yet. I'll use a more consistent workflow here, especially now that I know people are looking at the dev branch.

[netcarver]

Seeing as this has now been raised (indirectly) have you seen this? Don't be put off by that first diagram, it's pretty simple at heart. AFAIK, it is one of the classic git branch management models (though certainly not the only one) and provides command line tools to help folk manage the workflows themselves so it's actually quite easy to use. I also find gitg to be a very useful tool for managing git repos (there are others like gitk and tig as well).