Retiring master

[fu]

We have two main branches in the Dreamwidth repositories: master and develop.

master was intended to be used but... never really got any love.

So here's what I propose: remove all the instructions in our documentation which mention master, and just have 'develop`.

Since develop is where all work goes, nothing in the dev workflow will officially change. But occasionally we have accidents where master gets merged into developinstead of the other way around, or someone finds themselves on master when they should be on develop instead -- and removing any mention of master from our instructions should prevent that from ever happening again.

As for what will happen to master... we never actually used it, and at this point ingrained habits for develop + all setups old and new assume develop, so I suggest we continue not using master the way we currently do.

Comments

[mark]

+1

I would suggest that we go ahead and just force push master back to an empty readme file that has links to documentation, where to get the real branch, etc. I think that's much cleaner than having someone check out two year old code when they pull the repository.

[afuna]

It feels weird, almost heretical to force push master branch to empty. But done!

[mark]

Yay! Thank you! :)

[stormerider]

I thought that develop was where the code got changed, but master was what got pushed to the site?

[foxfirefey]

It was the original plan but I think it never ended up getting updated.

[fu]

Originally master was supposed to be "latest stable" but in practice we never really decided what latest stable meant so we didn't ever use it much.

[fu]

develop is where the code gets changed, but we make release branches off it and the latest release branch is what's pushed on the site.

[alexbayleaf]

On Growstuff, we use "dev" for developing against and "master" as our production/latest stable branch.

We have had a recent problem where people who have taken git tutorials expect to be using "master" all the time. This leads them to pull from master instead of dev when updating their own development branches, and things get wacky.

This may or may not occur with DW, but I just wanted to put it out there.

[fu]

Yeah it used to happen all the time, we'd get weird merge errors and have to talk people through fixing their branches (sometimes losing the person in the process through sheer frustration)

Master is now just a README pointing to the instructions for develop. Hopefully works for us better.