Hi, Otto, Thanks. I was thinking about something like that too. But I have mixed feelings about it. (+) it could be more familiar to new contributors, who, supposedly aren't familiar with the workflow where a newest version branch is the development branch (-) but it's exactly what Drupal is using, so MariaDB is not the only open source project that does that (+) I won't need to change the default branch in the github project config every three months (-) contributors will still need to rebase, from main to main, same branch name but otherwise exactly as many new commits (-) we'll need to adjust our tools, like buildbot, but I expect it'll only need minor changes, it shouldn't be a problem So, as you can see, I'm kind of on the fence. We can make either way work. Monty had an interesting argument thought. Say, he wants to fix a bug in 11.6. Pulls the latest 'main' branch, fixes the bug, buildbot, weekend. Then he pushes, but by that time I've already branched 11.6 off and the 'main' branch is now 11.7. Thus the bug fix ends in the wrong branch. I'd count it as a (-) of the 'main' model. What are the benefits (or drawbacks) that I've missed? Eric wrote he was advocating for this in the past, what were the arguments there? Regards, Sergei Chief Architect, MariaDB Server and security@mariadb.org On Jun 27, Otto Kekäläinen via developers wrote:
Hi!
Has the core developers had discussions about using branch name 'main' for development instead of switching to a new branch every 3 months?
If all new features and other additions would always target the branch 'main' it would lower the barrier of entry for new contributors, and decrease the number of unnecessary rebases done by contributors.
If the permanent development target was 'main', you would need to create new 11.x branches only at "freeze" when a new major version branch is cut for release.
MariaDB is currently the only open source project I know that does *not* have a main/master/trunk branch and instead does these constant new branch names. I imagine this is not only annoying for contributors, but also the core developers who waste time asking contributors to rebase PRs every 3 months (see https://github.com/MariaDB/server/pull/2556 and https://github.com/MariaDB/server/pull/2671 as examples).
- Otto