[Paparazzi-devel] On the state of the master, dev and 4.0_beta branches

[Felix Ruess]

Hi,

understandably there has been some confusion about the current state of master, dev and 4.0_beta.

So here is how I think it is supposed to be like (after we actually made a proper stable release):

• Master will always contain the latest stable release + minor bugfixes.
  Pull requests for master will only be accepted if they are bugfixes and don't add/break anything else.
• Dev contains the latest and greatest and is where development happens.
  So if you plan to add a new feature please do that in a feature branch based on the dev branch.
  
• If enough new features/major fixes have accumulated we'll make a new release_beta branch where it can be tested and stabilized.
  When ready we release by merging into master (and adding a tag, providing tarballs, doing a proper changelog, etc...)

At the moment we have a bit of an awkward situation:

• master is not really a stable released version, it's simply the older tested master without the numerous new features (and fixes!) that are currently in dev
  It's not receiving any significant updates until we do the 4.0 release.
• dev has a lot of fixes/cleanup/new features, and is working pretty well, but subject to change
  
• The 4.0_beta branch actually has more (not fully tested) changes than the dev branch, so it's probably a bit of a misnomer...
  It's probably more like an alpha branch that works quite well, but still misses quite a few thing that will will go into the 4.0 release.
  As a lot of people we using the dev branch, we decided to merge things that require configuration changes only into 4.0_beta. So 4.0_beta has all the dev goodness, plus additionally:
• All control gains are positive
• RC input follows sign conventions
• Settings for the telemetry modes are automatically generated from the XML file

So which branch to choose?

For those of you who are happy with master and don't depend on any fixes/features in dev, I would recommend to stay on master until the release.

Most people with at least a little bit of experience I would actually recommend to use and test the 4.0_beta branch as you will have to update your configuration at some point anyway and it would be really great to have a wider test base!

Cheers, Felix