Re: Another git question

[Tait <gnu...@t4...>]

Ethan A Merritt <sf...@us...> said (on 2017/11/17):
> Are you thinking there is (or could be) a "master" branch that is
> different from "development"?  What would that gain us?

Sorry, I should have gone to look at the branch structure of the
existing repository on SF. "Master" is normally the main branch,
whatever that means. In my head, I was imagining that master was
the current release branch based on what you'd written before.

Having cloned https://git.code.sf.net/p/gnuplot/git-trunk now,
I'll try to use the branch names that are actually there. What
I see is a master branch, and *-stable branches corresponding to
each release, so "master" is the development branch, it looks
like. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

> Under the model we have been using, most of the changes to the
> development branch never appear in the current stable branch. 
> Instead at some point we create a new stable branch and essentially
> freeze it except for bugfixes.  OK that's a bit of an overstatement. 
> Some relatively self-contained features can be added to the current
> stable branch, but normally only after they've been in the
> development branch for a while to shake out problems.
> That's the part I'm trying to figure out right now. 

When you say "development branch" I think (now) that you mean
master. Then, as with the branch-5-2-stable, you branch from
master and changes unique to 5.2 go on that branch. If some bug
fix on 5.2 also affects master, how does that fix get from 5.2
back to master? What kinds of things go onto branch-5-2-stable
that shouldn't go back to master?

> This is all new to me, but I think that the merge you describe is in
> a sense the  opposite of what I want to do.

Any of what I describe is bidirectional. Git does not care
whether you merge or cherry-pick from stable to development, or
from development to stable. Cherry-pick is really nothing more
than "copy and paste this commit". The only thing to keep
straight is that cherry-pick will "paste" the commit onto
whatever is currently checked out when you issue the command.