This page isn't intended to be an exercise in bureaucracy, but it is good to know have a list of what's going in the in the various branches in the project. If you start a new branch or branch prefix, please record it in this file.

There should be two groups of things at the "top-level" for branch naming:

• "Bare" branches

  These are branches where their names are simple and unstructured. There are two use categories for this:

  • The master, release, development, test group of branches. (Note that release is intended to be a transient branch, and won't always be present.)
  • Feature branches.

  Please chat with @joey-coleman before creating a bare branch.

• "Folder" branches

  These branch names have structure: the first part acts as a prefix to allow for grouping.

  • The personal branch prefixes, which are a person's initials followed by a / then some further descriptor.
  • Complex feature or sub-project branches, such as those for vdmj, symphony, etc.

  Note that you cannot create just the prefix: you actually have to create a branch like jwc/main that uses the prefix.

All branches must adhere to this naming scheme — we will chase cases that break convention. Branches with a personal prefix may use any name after the prefix, however, please avoid transitions such as jwc/thing to jwc/thing/subthing as this will cause general annoyance. Git does not allow you to have a folder branch and a leaf branch with the same name, so the two branch names mentioned in the last sentence are mutually exclusive.

This is the the main set of branches. We are currently doing a lot of migration work on them.

These branches track ongoing large projects.

User branches are only recorded so that we know who to get in touch with. Two guidelines:

1. Do not commit to or otherwise make changes to branches with someone else's prefix.
2. Merge from development frequently.

Essentially we're archiving the set of branches based on Nick Battle's VDMJ core; the main Overture codebase has restructured into a new AST (and the visitors over the AST incorporate VDMJ code, but don't use the VDMJ AST). While we shake out the last bugs in the new codebase, and while Nick transitions, we're using the vdmj/ branch prefix to track changes in the VDMJ code. Eventually we exect this to move into the overturetool/cold-storage repository.

These track the precise version of Overture that other platforms –Symphony and Crescendo– are using.