New MODX Revolution Branching Strategy.md

A New Branching Strategy for MODX Revolution

This week we have modified the branching strategy that we have been using when maintaining the MODX Revolution repository at Github. The long familiar master and develop branch are gone, and in their place we have major and minor version branches that serve the same purposes for each major and the current stable minor releases of MODX Revolution. Since the current stable minor release of version 2 is 2.4.0, that means we have a 2.x (default) branch and a 2.4.x branch which replace—in terms of where to target Pull Requests—develop and master respectively for version 2. In the coming days, a 3.x development branch will appear as well.

Following are some tips for keeping up with the changes.

Updating Existing Clones

If you have a clone of the official repository, you can quickly fetch and checkout the latest branches.

To checkout the latest changes targeted for the next minor release, including new features, bug fixes and translation updates:

$ git fetch origin
$ git checkout -b 2.x origin/2.x

To checkout just the latest bug fixes and translation updates for the current minor release, 2.4:

$ git fetch origin
$ git checkout -b 2.4.x origin/2.4.x

To cleanup your clone and remove the old remote tracking branches that have been deleted from the repository:

$ git remote prune origin

Updating Existing Forks

If you have a clone of an existing fork with the main repository added as a remote named upstream, you can quickly update your fork and your clone with the latest branches by executing the following commands.

To checkout the latest changes targeted for the next minor release, including new features, bug fixes and translation updates:

$ git fetch upstream
$ git checkout -b 2.x upstream/2.x

To checkout just the latest bug fixes and translation updates for the current minor release, 2.4:

$ git fetch upstream
$ git checkout -b 2.4.x upstream/2.4.x

To cleanup your clone and remove the old remote tracking branches that have been deleted from the upstream repository:

$ git remote prune upstream

Publish new branches and tags to your fork, a.k.a. origin with:

$ git push origin 2.x 2.4.x --tags

You can remove the old branches from your fork via GitHub or by using a command like:

$ git push origin :master :develop :release-2.2

NOTE: That would remove the old master, develop, and release-2.2 branches from your fork; you could remove all branches except 2.x, 2.4.x and any outstanding pull request branches.