christopher_dearb...@dell.com (christopher_dearb...@dell.com) wrote: > Disclaimer: I am not a github expert. > > Regarding branch lifecycle: > > 1. Work on the release being actively developed continues in a branch > > 2. When that release is shipped, another branch is made so that active > development on the next release can continue in one branch, and critical > fixes can be made in the shipped branch only if needed
Actually the convention is sort of the other way around: 1. Work on the next release typically happens in the 'master' branch. 2. When that release is shipped (or more typically, in the run-up to the release, e.g. at the beginning of a series of release candidates, or as part of a feature freeze, or maybe even earlier) a branch is created which corresponds to that release. This allows more risky development to continue in 'master' without the risk of destabilizing this new release branch. Depending on the timing of the creation of the release branch, it may or may not receive pre-release stabilization fixes, but it will almost certainly receive post-release fixes. > It sounds like the recommendation for best practice is to convert > the shipped branch to a tag once that branch is no longer supported? Yes, that's a good summary of what I'd recommend. > Is there a safe way to do this without risking losing the branch? Sure. Branches and tags are both simply references pointing to a particular commit, and no commit will be garbage-collected by git whilst there are still references to it or one of its descendants. So converting a branch to a tag is totally safe. Also note that unlike branches, tags are not namespaced per remote which makes them marginally more robust against accidental deletion. For example, if you did "git fetch $remote", and then later that remote became unavailable and you did "git remote rm $remote" without thinking, you would still have a local copy of the tags, even though you wouldn't have any references to the remote branches. > If a branch has 1 change in it that is not included in any other > branch, then it can't be converted to a tag can it? Yes it can. *Any* commit can be tagged, whether a branch points to it or not. _______________________________________________ Crowbar mailing list Crowbar@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/crowbar For more information: http://crowbar.github.com/
