Re: Workflow Recommendation - Probably your 1000th

[Stephen Bash <bash@genarts.com>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "bradford" <fingermark@gmail.com>
> To: "Stephen Bash" <bash@genarts.com>
> Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
> Sent: Thursday, December 1, 2011 3:46:52 PM
> Subject: Re: Workflow Recommendation - Probably your 1000th
> 
> Thanks, Stephen.   I guess I'm looking for more input on the
> advantages and disadvantages of using a QA and production branch vs
> just doing everything out of master.
> 
> Trying to go through the following:
> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617425
> scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
> 
> We have some weeks where we release very frequently and some weeks
> where we release only once a week and have to do production fixes in
> the meantime.  Sure other people have similar experiences.

Before continuing I guess two key assumptions factor into our workflow:
 1) we still work in a traditional major/minor release cycle with potentially weeks or even months between releases
 2) our customers can be running almost any historical version of our software

>From that perspective having a maintenance branch for each major revision of our software gives us a holding area where devs can fix bugs at any time without necessarily going through the entire tag/release/merge process (you can envision a "hot fix branch" that is long-lived).  For example, we often have documentation fixes that will sit on the maintenance branch until a software fix needs to go out.  But other non-critical fixes also end up waiting on something that really requires a maintenance release (or enough fixes pile up and necessitate a release themselves).

HTH,
Stephen