Our basic branching philosophy is:

1. the main development and bugfixes go into master
2. when stabilizing code for a release, cut a branch from master
3. branch as late as possible
4. when committing code for a release, the code goes in the release branch(es) (if any) and master.
5. experimental stuff and big changes might have their own branches

See branches for the most up to date branches.

The way we work right now, you will check everything into master. If there is a branch for the target release(s), you should check the code into the branch(es) as well. If you have code that needs to go in a release between the latest branch and master, then you need to have someone create a branch.

So:

The current version is x.y. It was built from the RELEASE-x.y branch.

            ---RELEASE-x.y-----------------------------------
           /   (Changes for release x.y and beyond go here)
          /
         /
-master---/---(All changes go here)-------------------
             Releases x.y+1 (or x+1.0) will be built from this code
             eventually.

An example:

Development for the 0.6 release is proceeding. Code is being checked into master, and there are no active branches. The Version: in the spec files in master contain 0.6.x 1%{?dist}. Eventually 0.6 becomes stable enough that we are ready to build RPMS, or a developer is ready to work on release 0.7.

So, we create the branch. There may be point releases, so we name the branch appropriately.

git checkout master
git pull (make sure things are clean)
git checkout -b spacewalk-0.6
git push origin spacewalk-0.6:refs/heads/SPACEWALK-0.6
git checkout --track -b my-localbranch origin/SPACEWALK-0.6

SPACEWALK-0.6 branch will then be used to build any 0.6 point releases (including .0).

So far so good. One problem: The Version: in the spec files in the branch and in master are identical! If we build RPMs from both the branch and master, we will end up with version conflicts, and be very sad. Now we can go back to master and fix the Version: in the spec files there.

All code committed to release branches must also be included in master. (git cherry-pick and git merge very useful for this). For help with the git commands see GitGuide