[lucy-dev] Feature branches

[Nick Wellnhofer <we...@aevum.de>]

What's the preferred workflow when creating branches for new features? 
Simply create a branch named LUCY-nnn, according to the JIRA issue number?

Nick

Re: [lucy-dev] Feature branches

[Marvin Humphrey <ma...@rectangular.com>]

On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 04:14:36PM +0100, Nick Wellnhofer wrote:
> What's the preferred workflow when creating branches for new features?  

I'm pretty sure there aren't any specific recommendations in the ASF docs
regarding branching, so we get to establish our own conventions.

The one ASF-wide principle we should take into account is that large-scale
offline development is discouraged as community-unfriendly, since large code
drops are hard to review, hard to grok, and limit community input.

Another thing to bear in mind is that while the ASF does net yet offer Git as
an official option for version control, there is an "experimental" pilot
project underway, and it seems likely that Git will become an option for us at
some point next year.  Given the enthusiasm of several of our community
members for Git, I imagine we will switch -- and so we should try to design
our branching conventions with that in mind.

FWIW, I've seen a lot of good stuff go by on the Perl 5 Porters mailing list
about workflows, and I think we would benefit from studying what they have done.

> Simply create a branch named LUCY-nnn, according to the JIRA issue 
> number?

Good plan. :)

In some cases, there may need to be more than one feature branch; indeed under
Git, I expect that we will want to encourage that development take place on
short-lived feature branches.  To accommodate multiple branches, we may need
to append a descriptive name onto the issue identifier.  Following this
convention, the feature branch I worked on a while back would have been named
"LUCY-142-clownfish_lemon" instead of "clownfish_lemon".

Marvin Humphrey