Branch management¶

Intended audience

This guide is intended for maintainers and developers of InvenioRDM itself.

Scope

The guide covers how branches are managed in InvenioRDM in order to support the maintenance policy.

Overview¶

The latest InvenioRDM release is supported until the next release (see maintenance policy).

Opening pull requests¶

PR against `master`/`main`¶

You should normally always open pull requests against the master/main branch. One exception is when a bug/security fix is only reproducible on a maintenance branch.

Separate logical commits¶

If you are fixing a bug, please ensure that the bug is fixed in a separate logical commit, to ensure that it is easy to backport the fix to previous maintained releases.

Security fixes are done in hidden branches¶

Note that security fixes are normally done in a coordinated way using hidden branches until PyPI releases have been issued. Please get in touch with a maintainer.

Merging pull requests¶

A PR is merged as usual once the continuous integration tests pass and the code has been through a code review.

Maintainer is responsible for backporting¶

The maintainer merging the PR is now responsible for backporting the fix to all maintained releases. The maintainer is free to ask the developer opening the PR to backport the fix, but it's the maintainer that's ultimately responsible for ensuring that the fix is backported.

Backporting¶

Following is a small recipe for how to backport a fix:

Identify the commit on master/main that you want to backport.
```
git log master
```
Identify the branches you have to backport the fix to (using above table of supported maintenance branches).

Cherry-pick the identified commit to all supported maintenance branches.

git checkout maint-6.0
git cherry-pick <commit hash>
git checkout maint-10.0
git cherry-pick <commit hash>

Releasing a new maintenance release is covered under release management.

Branching¶

Table must be kept updated¶

The table over supported maintenance releases/branches must be updated when:

a new major version is released
a major version reaches end of life.

First, make sure the end of life and support versions have been updated in the maintenance policy.

Once you have determined which major versions of InvenioRDM that are supported, you can start from invenio-app-rdm to figuoure out which module versions and branches that are supported and can update the table accordingly.

Create maintenance branches on release¶

When a new release is released, the release manager should go through all above repositories and create maint-x.y branches from the master/main branch.

The newly created maintenance branches must be added to repositories.yml to configure branch protection in GitHub so only maintainers can merge to the branch.