I have changes in the master that are needed for some users of Mahout. However the master is often chaotic due to being the branch that is the SNAPSHOT of all partial or not well tested changes. The key feature of the branching model described in the blog is that master is stable and contains only the last release and fixes of features considered critical to users. The SNAPSHOT is in a branch called “develop". We have used this method in PredictionIO for years and it is quite nice. The older method used in Mahout leaves me in the situation of recommending that users pull a specific commit rather than the master. With this new model we would be able to tag and rename artifacts and any pull from master should be far more stable than it is now.
I’d like to propose we use this model for future development. The primary difference would be that the current master would become “develop” and the master would contain the last stable release plus any “hotfix”es. The changes I made to support a user would be proposed for inclusion in the “hiotfix” branch and merged with master and develop. Master would get a tag and perhaps new artifact name like 0.12.2-hotfix.1 and would be documented as a source only “hotfix” it would not require a full maven-verse binary release. The benefit to all users is a stable master and a way to get changes in a sane way with reliable artifact names. http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ <http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/> Thoughts?
