Welcome to the Git development community. This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git project is managed, and how you can work with it. The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx>; please do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be seen by any human being. Spam filters learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder). * Mailing list and the community The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to the list address <git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>. You don't have to be subscribed to send messages. The convention on the list is to keep everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me, I am not subscribed". As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor. If you are a GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked. Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the project convention. If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise. Please do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case. Messages getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a reminder. The list archive is available at a few public sites: http://lore.kernel.org/git/ http://marc.info/?l=git http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/ For those who prefer to read it over NNTP: nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git are available. When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do so, like this: http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <> stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important message in the Git list). Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Libera Chat. Their logs are available at: http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/). Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit organization (https://sfconservancy.org/). To reach a committee of liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>. For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source tree, or: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md * Reporting bugs When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop your bug report with just "git does not work". "I used git in this way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git in this way, and X happend, which is broken". It often is that git is correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid. Please remember to always state - what you wanted to achieve; - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce the behavior); - what you saw happen (X above); - what you expected to see (Y above); and - how the last two are different. See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further hints. Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report. If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at our security mailing list <git-security@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>. This is a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about vulnerabilities, including: - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities - people operating major git hosting sites with many users - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people where these issues are discussed without risk of the information leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements. * Repositories and documentation. My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/ https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/ https://github.com/git/git/ https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/ This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also individual topics broken out: https://github.com/gitster/git/ A few web interfaces are found at: http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be found in: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/ https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/ https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/ The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be viewed online at: https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html * How various branches are used. There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen". They however almost never get new commits made directly on them. Instead, a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic", whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch" is merged to these integration branches. The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and ready to be used in a production setting. Every now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch. They used to be named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0"). The last such release was 2.40 done on Mar 13rd, 2023. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released versions. Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from "master" at that point. Obvious and safe fixes after a feature release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from it. Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first, several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance of last-minute issues, but things like embargoed security fixes may first appear in the maintenance tracks and merged up to "master" at the same time. The maintenance releases used to be named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature release). These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series). New features never go to the "maint" branch. It is merged into "master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward. A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions. Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master". It might not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it is merged to "master". Please help this process by building & using the "next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master". The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen. There is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen" branch. This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more, but can be used by contributors to anticipate what topics from others may cause conflict with your work, and find people who are working. on these topics to talk to before the potential conflicts get out of control. The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well documented and they often need further work. When a topic that was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next". You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are currently in flight. Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case. The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the maintainer for his daily work. Using the tip of this branch, instead of 'next', as your daily driver is also recommended. The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next" usually will not be either. After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release. Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may get ejected from "next" when this happens. A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version, and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous patches and how the problem was corrected. Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release, nor even in any future release. There were cases that topics needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next". * Other people's trees. Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes should be sent. As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them. Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their own authoritative repository and maintainers: - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav: https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project: git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin: https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/ When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system, please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two even have different directory structures).