Hi Fon Noel and others,

On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 4:35 PM, Fon Noel <fenn25.fn@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello everyone I was wondering if someone can help me explain the use of all the branches on https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadin there are 7 of them if I am not mistaken including master,  STABLE and the rest. How do I leverage all these branches in order to improve my contribution to PMA. So far I have been working only with the master branch. I read the documentation on docs.phpmyadmin.net even so the developer information there is limited. Maybe I will be able to update that in future. Cheers PMA team! 

Indeed there are several branches and it can get confusing.

* master is where main development occurs and is the next "y" release of x.y.z (so master is currently working towards the release of 4.8, which is a bit confusing because 4.7.0 isn't really out yet, but is feature frozen which is when the change actually occurs). New features, language/string changes, and major changes to fragile code go in to master.
* the QA branch (currently QA_4_7) is for bugfixes. This turns in to a "z" release of x.y.z (so current QA_4_7 is working towards 4.7.0, and after 4.7.0 is released it will be for bug fixes towards 4.7.1). Rarely do we make any string/language changes to a QA branch (except specifically when there's a typo only for one particular language).
* STABLE is automatically updated when a new release is merged. There isn't any reason to develop anything directly in STABLE.
* MAINT branches are for backporting security fixes to old versions that are still receiving security support. You probably will never need to develop in any MAINT branch, either.

This is meant be conveyed through https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/wiki/Release_targets but it may benefit from clearer writing and from being linked to from more locations.

Hope that helps.

 
Fon Noel. 


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