etcd-io__etcd/Documentation/branch_management.md

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title: Branch management

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 subsequently be ported to stable branches.
• Once the master branch is ready for release, it will be tagged and become the new stable branch.

The etcd team has adopted a rolling release model and supports one stable version of etcd.

Master branch

The master branch is our development branch. All new features land here first.

To try new and experimental features, pull master and play with it. Note that master may not be 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 considered stable branches.

After every 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 previous releases. The patch release, incorporating any bug fixes, will be once every two weeks, given any patches.