Heads-up devs: New branching model is now active

First of all: If you are just a regular user of OctoPrint who doesn’t know what git is and has never checked out OctoPrint’s source code to look at the code and/or make changes on it, this likely doesn’t affect you and you can stop to read here 😊

For all of the power users and developers among you that want to know what changed about OctoPrint’s branching model, read on.

For the longest time now I’ve been unhappy with the existing branching model on OctoPrint: The name maintenance for the most active development branch hasn’t properly mirrored its actual role for a long time, devel hasn’t seen any meaningful changes in years, and there was a whole cluster of staging/* and rc/* branches that I had to juggle on every RC and stable release. The whole model was extremely complicated, and also made it more difficult for contributors to send their first PR.

So, earlier this year I planned a new branching model for OctoPrint, and after a lot of preparation just put that into effect.

To summarize the changes that happened earlier today:

• master has been renamed to main
• maintenance has been renamed to dev
• staging/bugfix has been renamed to bugfix
• staging/maintenance has been renamed to next
• rc/maintenance, rc/devel and staging/devel have been removed
• devel has been renamed to stale/devel and will be removed once I’m sure I have migrated any changes that might still be interesting from there

You can read all about the new branching model in the updated docs, but the gist of it is that all development happens on dev (and that should also be the target of any and all PRs), bugfix is used for preparing bugfix releases and next is used for preparing and tagging release candidates of upcoming stable releases.

Web server redirects should be in place for the docs and the source view on GitHub. If you have a local git checkout of OctoPrint however, you need to update your branch names and upstreams! Read below on how to do that.

There will probably be some hiccups here and there where I forgot to rename something that’s still referring to one of the old branches, but overall I hope it should be smooth flying from here on out.

How to update your local checkout

First of all, make sure main (the former master) is updated correctly:

git fetch origin
git remote prune origin
git fetch origin
git branch -m master main
git branch -u origin/main main
git remote set-head origin -a

Then, to change the name and upstream on a any further branches you might have checked out, run the following commands:

git branch -m <oldname> <newname>
git branch -u origin/<newname> <newname>