Now a new feature release is out, it's time to welcome new people to the list. This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work with it. * IRC and Mailing list Many active members of development community hang around on #git IRC channel. Its log is available at: http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/git The development however is primarily done on this mailing list you are reading right now. If you have patches, please send them to the list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches. I usually read all patches posted to the list, and follow almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an obscure corner that I do not personally use. But I am obviously not perfect. If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me. The list archive is available at a few public sites as well: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP: nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git * Repositories, branches and documentation. My public git.git repository is at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/ This is mirrored at Pasky's site at git://repo.or.cz/git.git/ but the first has a few hours mirroring delay after I publish updates, and the latter, being a mirror of former, lags behind it further. Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I also push into an alternate here: git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/ Impatient people would have better luck with the last one (but the last repository does not have "html", "man" and "todo" branches, described next). There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man". The first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a list so it is not as often updated as it could/should be. It also contains some helper scripts I use to maintain git. The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at kernel.org at: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/ The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has links to documentation of older releases. The script to maintain these two documentation branches are found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested. It is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate a task. There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu". The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and ready to be used in a production setting. There could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs but they are not expected to be anything major. Every now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits. The last such release was v1.5.1 done on April 4th this year. Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from "master" at that point. Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from it. The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was v1.5.0.7. New features never goes to this branch. This branch is also merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward. A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master". A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not usually happen on "master", however. Instead, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point. Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running ahead of "master" in git.git repository. I do not publish the tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy. I judge the quality of topic branches, taking advices from the mailing list discussions. Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then with some more work (either by the original contributor or help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can now be tested by wider audience". Luckily, most of them start out in the latter, better shape. The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter category. In general, the branch always contains the tip of "master". It might not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work more or less without major breakage. I usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. The above three branches, "master", "maint" and "next" are never rewound, so you should be able to safely track them (this automatically means the topics that have been merged into "next" are not rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are interested in out of "git log next" output). The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of topic branches. The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it graduates to "next". I do this with: git checkout next git merge that-topic-branch Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so hot and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case. A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to perfection before it is merged to "master". Similarly to the above I do it with this: git checkout master git merge that-topic-branch git branch -d that-topic-branch However, being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any future release. There even were cases that topics needed a few reverting before graduating to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" were reverted from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later. Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just before the release. * Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits. Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should be sent to. As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors of them. Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their own authoritative repository and maintainers: git-gui/ -- this subdirectory comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project, which is found at: git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git gitk -- this file is maintained by Paul Packerras, at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current shape. Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily: - Linus on general design issues. - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre, and Rene Scharfe on general implementation issues. - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues. - Martin Langhoff on cvsserver and cvsimport. - Paul Packerras on gitk. - Eric Wong on git-svn. - Jakub Narebski and Luben Tuikov on gitweb. - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html