Development Plan for 7.1 Release

Future Structure of Development Tree

The current plan is to discontinue the current version of trunk in the future. Trunk has to some extent has functioned as the release branch for 7.0, and as such we should continue to maintain it for now (bug fixes applied to this branch, fixes that are then merged into dev) so Charles can continue to cut 7.0 releases in the immediate future.

In the future we should move to having one development tree to avoid confusion, the idea is to work from what is now dev in the future, and from dev branch off release versions. Any major new work, for example the QT5 work currently in progress will be branched off dev as well to keep it isolated from releases, until it is ready for general releas. The above diagram is indicative of how this should work.

To Summarise :

• dev is to be kept as pristine as possible. The idea is dev should be in a state that one could, if they wanted to, cut a release from it & it would be fine for users.
• Any experimental work or work on major new features is to be branched off from dev. It only gets merged back in when we are happy this is in a releasable state & all problems have been worked through. When we merge this into dev we create a tag in dev.
• We create release branches from dev; all bug-fixes are carried out in in this release branch and then merged back into dev. Both dev and the release branch are tagged at each minor release (bug fixes only).
• If we want to introduce a major new feature to a release branch (a feature merged into dev after the release branch was started) we create a new branch (say 7.14) and then discontinue the old release branch (7.1).

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