SaltStack Git Policy

The SaltStack team follows a git policy to maintain stability and consistency with the repository.

The git policy has been developed to encourage contributions and make contributing to Salt as easy as possible. Code contributors to SaltStack projects DO NOT NEED TO READ THIS DOCUMENT, because all contributions come into SaltStack via a single gateway to make it as easy as possible for contributors to give us code.

The primary rule of git management in SaltStack is to make life easy on contributors and developers to send in code. Simplicity is always a goal!

New Code Entry

All new SaltStack code is posted to the develop branch, which is the single point of entry. The only exception is when a bugfix to develop cannot be cleanly merged into a release branch and the bugfix needs to be rewritten for the release branch.

Release Branching

SaltStack maintains two types of releases, Feature Releases and Point Releases. A feature release is managed by incrementing the first or second release point number, so 0.10.5 -> 0.11.0 signifies a feature release and 0.11.0 -> 0.11.1 signifies a point release, also a hypothetical 0.42.7 -> 1.0.0 would also signify a feature release.

Feature Release Branching

Each feature release is maintained in a dedicated git branch derived from the last applicable release commit on develop. All file changes relevant to the feature release will be completed in the develop branch prior to the creation of the feature release branch. The feature release branch will be named after the relevant numbers to the feature release, which constitute the first two numbers. This means that the release branch for the 0.11.0 series is named 0.11.

A feature release branch is created with the following command:

# git checkout -b 0.11 # From the develop branch
# git push origin 0.11

Point Releases

Each point release is derived from its parent release branch. Constructing point releases is a critical aspect of Salt development and is managed by members of the core development team. Point releases comprise bug and security fixes which are cherry picked from develop onto the aforementioned release branch. At the time when a core developer accepts a pull request a determination needs to be made if the commits in the pull request need to be backported to the release branch. Some simple criteria are used to make this determination:

  • Is this commit fixing a bug? Backport
  • Does this commit change or add new features in any way? Don't backport
  • Is this a PEP8 or code cleanup commit? Don't backport
  • Does this commit fix a security issue? Backport

Determining when a point release is going to be made is up to the project leader (Thomas Hatch). Generally point releases are made every 1-2 weeks or if there is a security fix they can be made sooner.

The point release is only designated by tagging the commit on the release branch with release number using the existing convention (version 0.11.1 is tagged with v0.11.1). From the tag point a new source tarball is generated and published to PyPI, and a release announcement is made.