If you use ClamAV’s Git repository, you may have noticed that we’ve recently changed our Git workflow.
It’s a big departure from what we had been doing, and we believe it will be a major improvement. Our new workflow took inspiration from the popular and well-known GitFlow model, and it shares some of its features. However, to better suit our needs, we’ve made a number of modifications and simplifications to the original GitFlow paradigm. Here’s a rundown of some of the most important changes:
- New commits will go into dev/0.101 instead of master. The default branch will now be dev/0.101.
- When unit tests, system tests, and regression tests on dev/0.101 are up to snuff, we will cherry-pick the commits over to master. This way, master will always be stable.
- After successful testing on dev/0.100, the patch(es) will be cherry-picked to rel/0.101 and tagged for the patch version release (0.101.1).
- Meanwhile, the same urgent patch(es) will undergo normal testing in the current dev branch (dev/0.102). Security related patches will remain private until the patch version release is published.
As a disclaimer: We’re just getting started with the new Git workflow, which means that master isn’t proven stable yet. Also, we have some major automation improvements to make to our system and regression-testing processes that will make this workflow highly effective. The automation improvements are still in the works, and are probably a couple months out. Until then, any testing done before we cherry-pick changes to master will be mostly manual.
The takeaway from this is that these are the important branches in the ClamAV Git repository:
- dev/0.101 — The latest unstable code in development.
- master — The latest tested stable code.
- rel/0.100 — The latest released version, which is also posted on clamav.net.
- dev/0.100 — The previous development branch, used to test hotfixes prior to a patch release.
For any further questions or discussion please head on over to our ClamAV-devel mailing list
http://lists.clamav.net/mailman/listinfo/clamav-devel
Thank you.