Re: [boost] [GitHub] [PR] setting default branch to 'develop'

Subject: Re: [boost] [GitHub] [PR] setting default branch to 'develop'
From: Vladimir Prus (vladimir.prus_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-10-30 03:17:53

On 30-Oct-15 4:12 AM, Glen Fernandes wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2015, John Maddock wrote:
>>
>> This also has the side-effect that if someone hits the "download zip" button
>> they get develop, which is probably not what we want?
>>
>
> I feel that it is certainly not what we want. It seems
> counter-intuitive (going by what appears to be widespread practice
> with public git repositories) that the 'default' branch is not the
> stable one.

That's a good argument, but Boost is not really following standard git practices
already.

For most projects, you'd send pull requests against master, which would
be sort of stable, and then releases would be made from a release branch off master.

We do all development on 'develop', with 'master' updated rarely, and often maintainers
forget to update 'master' at all. If somebody checks out an individual Boost repository,
he probably does it to contribute to development. Checking out it for production use
seems unlikely, since for production use you'd need to check out dozens of repositories,
and doing that individually is extra painful, comparing to just cloning superproject (whose
default branch *is* master still). And if you checkout an individual repository to
send pull requests, getting 3-month old 'master' branch is not very useful.

> I understand the motivation, but couldn't we just request from any
> contributors to submit a new pull request against 'develop' instead of
> 'master'?

I doubt anybody would read any instructions before sending a one-line fix.

-- 
Vladimir Prus
http://vladimirprus.com