[Biojava-dev] Please direct pull requests to the appropriate branch

[Jose Manuel Duarte]

This is indeed a difficult issue. I think that in principle it is a good 
idea to keep the separate branches and have a cleaner developing 
progress. Thus I supported Spencer's idea of splitting into 
patch/minor/master.

At the same time this system adds to the complexity of the workflow and 
especially makes things more complicated for newcomers and that is an 
important concern. Also things are less agile: it forces to think in a 
rather rigid development scheme that can make things slower, departing 
from the release-fast philosophy.

With the little experience we've had so far we have already seen issues 
with it, e.g. there was a pull request merged to master that should have 
gone to patch. I can see this kind of things happening often. Pull 
requests from new contributors will surely be going to master if they 
don't know our policies. For some people git is complex enough and 
adding the several branches layer makes things even more difficult.

So if we need to rethink this I would support the simple approach of a 
monolithic master-only development. In a world of a few core developers 
only, the multi-branch option would be fine. For a more realistic 
scenario with an open community with new contributors coming in all the 
time, simple sounds like the best idea.

Jose



On 19.02.2015 16:11, Andreas Prlic wrote:
> Hi Spencer,
>
> By having the master branch flagged for a future 5.0 release, I am 
> concerned that we are making contributions more difficult. Shouldn't 
> master be the main branch on which most developments happen? Our goal 
> is to enable the ease of contribution and to make frequent releases.
>
> There are more than one way of dealing with branches. We need to agree 
> on one strategy and document this well.
>
> Andreas
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 2:09 AM, Spencer Bliven <sbliven at ucsd.edu 
> <mailto:sbliven at ucsd.edu>> wrote:
>
>     As a reminder to everyone, we're currently maintaining separate
>     branches for patch, minor, and master which correspond to features
>     for 4.0.1, 4.1.0, and 5.0.0 respectively. One thing that would
>     really help with this is if everyone can make pull requests to the
>     correct branch, rather than accepting the default of master. This
>     can be done from the compare screen by selecting the appropriate
>     base branch (on the left).
>
>     I also recommend maintaining local patch/minor/master branches, to
>     allow testing with the correct features. I know this is a bit of a
>     hassle, but let's at least give it a shot.
>
>     It is important to never merge master into either of the earlier
>     branches. If features from master need to be back-ported to patch
>     or minor, this can be done with git's cherry-pick command.
>
>     Cheers,
>     Spencer
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     biojava-dev mailing list
>     biojava-dev at mailman.open-bio.org
>     <mailto:biojava-dev at mailman.open-bio.org>
>     http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-dev
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> biojava-dev mailing list
> biojava-dev at mailman.open-bio.org
> http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-dev

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.open-bio.org/pipermail/biojava-dev/attachments/20150220/5b0c0ab1/attachment.html>