Should there be separate release and development branches?

ESIPFed / sweet

Official repository for Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET) Ontologies

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Should there be separate release and development branches? #204

Open brandonnodnarb opened 4 years ago

brandonnodnarb commented 4 years ago

SWEET currently uses main as a stable, or release, branch (assuming release is stable) as well as PRs for what are effectively development branches. Is there a need to make this explicit for potentially new users and/or contributors?

For example, having #203 in a dev branch to signify technical stability (e.g. it doesn't break in an ontology editor) without semantic verification may be useful, particularly for the larger scale changes and additions.

graybeal commented 4 years ago

+1 especially when a PR timeline gets stretched out by lots of comments

charlesvardeman commented 4 years ago

I would agree that to further encourage contribution to SWEET, we probably need a more explicit branch structure. The other structure to consider might be a "pending" type structure similar to what schema.org uses that creates something of an intermediate release of new terms. Adopters have the freedom to start using the terms with the caveat that things may change in the final release. It also gives the opportunity to catch bugs with a term before it is "fully released".