Basho repository management

Background

Most of Basho's GitHub repositories (including Riak) historically used the master branch for active development, with releases tagged from master.

The team developing Riak CS uses a different structure based on git-flow.

In August of 2013, in preparation for the stabilization of Riak 2.0, we decided to standardize on the Riak CS branch naming convention and implement our processes around that.

Repository naming

• All Basho repositories will have two or three primary branches:
  • develop - For active development via pull requests. This will be the default branch in GitHub
  • master - For release-quality code
  • staging - For code that has passed automated testing. This will typically only exist for larger repositories
• Working branches should include feature/ or bugfix/ as a naming prefix
  • E.g., feature/jdb-thumbprint-recognition

Release branches

• Each code freeze for a pre-release up to but not including the last freeze will result in a tag on staging (e.g., 2.0-pre1)
  • Bug fixes during these code freezes will follow the normal process: pull requests against develop, then merged to staging
• The last pre-release code freeze will result in a release branch off staging, named after the release
  • E.g., we will branch staging to a new 2.0 branch
  • From this point forward, effectively all development will be bug fixes in the form of pull requests against the new branch
• Each release candidate will be tagged on the release branch (2.0-rc1)
• The production release will be tagged (2.0.0) and merged back to develop and master for tagging and shipment

Illustrated