Introduction

Main project page is hosted by google code, but the main development occurs on github, mostly because github was the fist code collaboration application using git SCM. This page describes how git is used by wro4j and the details about branching naming conventions and way of working.

Details

Conventions:

• The project has more than one branch.
• The main development doesn't occur on master branch. Master is used only to hold the versions of the last release.
• Tags are prefixed with v followed by the version number. Ex: v1.0
• Main development branches contains version number followed by .x. Ex: 1.4.x. The .x is the part from where minor versions will be created. For instance, if latest stable release is 1.4.3, the development branch is 1.4.x, next release will be 1.4.4.
• There can be multiple development branches. Ex: 1.4.x, 1.5.x. This does make sense when there are major changes or feature additions.
• Feature branch - is a branch which contains only the changes associated with a single issue. This is useful, in order to easily merge feature branches into different development branches.
• The name of the feature branch can be anything which suggest somehow the details about the feature. Example: wildcard, modelUpdate, etc. Or even better, you can name the branches with the issue number from the issue tracker. Example: issue331, issue344, etc (this helps to easily understand what kind of work is going on a particular branch).
• Each feature branch is merged into main development branch after it is completed and unit tested.

Examples:

Starting to work on a new feature

1. Checkout the main development branch

git checkout 1.4.x

2. Create the feature branch from main development branch. Here we create a new branch called issue321 starting from the main development branch 1.4.x:

git checkout -b issue321

3. Work on that branch and commit as often as you need your changes. These can be unstable also.

git commit -m "start implementation"

4. When the feature is ready, it can be merged back into main development branch.

git checkout 1.4.x
git merge issue321 --no-ff

You can notice the following:

• first we switch back to main development branch
• next we merge all feature commits into 1.4.x
• --no-ff option is useful to preserve the history in a nice way.

1. Push the changes to origin

  git push origin 1.4.x

The steps described above, can be visualized as this:

(issue321)*----*------*-------*
        |                      |
        |                      |
(1.4.x)*-----------------------*-----------

You can also take a look on network graph on github page: https://github.com/alexo/wro4j/network

Useful Git Commands