Merge pull request #2509 from yichengq/341

docs: add branch management

Documentation/branch_management.md

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+## Branch Managemnt
+
+### Guide
+
+- New development occurs on the master branch
+- Master branch should always have a green build!
+- Backwards-compatible bug fixes should target the master branch and ported to stable
+- Once the master branch is ready for release, it will be tagged and become the new stable branch.
+
+The etcd team adopts a rolling release model and support one stable version of etcd going forward.
+
+### Master branch
+
+The master branch is our development branch. It is where all the new features go into first.
+
+If you want to try new features, pull the master branch and play on it. But the branch is not really stable because new features may introduce bugs.
+
+Before the release of the next stable version, feature PRs will be frozen. We will focus on the testing, bug-fix and documentation for one to two weeks.
+
+### Stable branches
+
+All branches with prefix 'release-' are stable branches.
+
+After a Minor release (http://semver.org/), we will have a new stable branch for that release. We will keep fixing the backwards-compatible bugs for the latest stable release, but not the olders. The bug fixes Patch release will be once every two weeks, given any patches.

README.md

@@ -30,6 +30,10 @@ If you're considering etcd for production use, please see: [production-ready.md]
 
 The latest release and setup instructions are available at [GitHub][github-release].
 
+You can build a latest etcd from master branch. All development occurs on the master branch which includes new features and bug fixes.
+
+Bug fixes should target the master branch and ported to the appropriate release branch as described in the [branch management](./Documentation/branch_management.md) guide.
+
 [github-release]: https://github.com/coreos/etcd/releases/
 
 ### Running etcd