Development

Branches and Tags

There are two main branches for development in taco: an active development branch that may break, and an infrequently updated stable branch that points to the latest tested and verified version of taco.

We utilize a two-track convention with branches - one development branch and one stable branch:

• master (unstable) - this points to the latest commit on the development branch of taco

• stable (stable) - this points to the latest commit on the stable branch of taco

Branches for each release version also exist. We create a branch for each version release to enable version-specific maintenance commits. Release branches also follow the two-track method. Release branches are named:

• release/v0.0 (stable) - this contains all commits specific to release version 0.0 of taco

• release/v0.0beta (unstable) - this contains unstable development code for preparing for release version 0.0 of taco (beta version)

The release branches use only the major and minor numbers, but tags are used for each major, minor, and patch number. The convention for naming tags in taco is the letter v followed by the version (major, minor, and patch) v0.0.0.

All tags for a major and minor version X.Y will point to commits on the release/vX.Y branch.

Workflow

The normal workflow is to create a new branch to add features or fix features, and merge commits from that branch into master, then into stable, and eventually on into a versioned release.

Adding New Features

To add new features, create a new branch using the master branch as a source, and make your commits on this branch. When you're ready, run tests on the branch to ensure the modified code works as expected. Merge this code into the master branch.

Once the code has been tested, checked for backwards compatibility, linted, minted, stamped, licensed, etc., it can be merged into the stable branch.

Creating New Version

When you have commits in stable and are ready to release them as a new version, create a new pre-release branch release/v0.0beta from the appropriate stable commit.

(If the features you want to add to a new version of taco are not in the stable branch yet, start by getting them into stable.)

You should not be doing regular development on the beta branches, but some hot-fix or workaround commits may be required, hence the unstable label.

Once release/v0.0beta has been tested and is ready for release, create a new branch release/v0.0 for the stable release of version 0.0 of taco.