Collaborating on research software

Steps

• Define your collaboration needs
• Define your contribution workflow
• Document your workflow

How much Git is necessary?

Simple personal projects

• Typically start with just the main branch.
• Use branches for unfinished/untested ideas.
• Use branches when you are not sure about a change.
• Use tags to mark important milestones.

Projects with few persons: you accept things breaking sometimes

• It might be reasonable to commit to the main branch and feature branches.

Projects with few persons: changes are reviewed by others

• The main branch is write-protected.
• You create new feature branches for changes.
• Changes are reviewed before they are merged to the main branch.

When you distribute releases

• If you want to patch releases, you probably need release branches.
• The main branch is read-only.
• You may need a develop branch for active development
• Many branching models exist.

You can use the branching model to define a branch based workflow for your repositories. In these slides, we will introduce the GitFlow branching model.

Basic workflow

• main
  • The integration branch for feature work (default branch).
  • Indefinite lifetime
• feature-<name-of-feature>
  • Branch used for specific feature work or improvements.
  • Short/long lifetime

Protected production branch

• main
  • Used for deploying a release.
  • Use tags to track software versions.
  • Protected branch, requries approved pull requests
  • Indefinite lifetime
• develop
  • The integration branch for feature work.
  • Indefinite lifetime
• feature-<name-of-feature>

Additional supporting branches

• hotfix-<name-of-issue>
  • Used to quickly fix main without interrupting changes in the development.
  • Short lifetime

Additional supporting branches

• release-<version>
  • Used to prepare a new production release.
  • Allow minor bugfixes and preparing metadata.
  • Short lifetime
• bugfix-<name-of-issue>
  • Typically used to fix release branches.
  • Short lifetime