Workflow for Maintainers

This page is for maintainers — those of us who merge our own or other peoples’ changes into the upstream repository.

Being as how you’re a maintainer, you are completely on top of the basic stuff in Workflow for Developers.

Integrating changes manually

First, check out the astropy repository. The instructions in Overview add a remote that has read-only access to the upstream repo. Being a maintainer, you’ve got read-write access.

It’s good to have your upstream remote have a scary name, to remind you that it’s a read-write remote:

git remote add upstream-rw git@github.com:astropy/astropy.git
git fetch upstream-rw

Let’s say you have some changes that need to go into trunk (upstream-rw/master).

The changes are in some branch that you are currently on. For example, you are looking at someone’s changes like this:

git remote add someone git://github.com/someone/astropy.git
git fetch someone
git branch cool-feature --track someone/cool-feature
git checkout cool-feature

So now you are on the branch with the changes to be incorporated upstream. The rest of this section assumes you are on this branch.

A few commits

If there are only a few commits, consider rebasing to upstream:

# Fetch upstream changes
git fetch upstream-rw

# Rebase
git rebase upstream-rw/master

Remember that, if you do a rebase, and push that, you’ll have to close any github pull requests manually, because github will not be able to detect the changes have already been merged.

A long series of commits

If there are a longer series of related commits, consider a merge instead:

git fetch upstream-rw
git merge --no-ff upstream-rw/master

The merge will be detected by github, and should close any related pull requests automatically.

Note the --no-ff above. This forces git to make a merge commit, rather than doing a fast-forward, so that these set of commits branch off trunk then rejoin the main history with a merge, rather than appearing to have been made directly on top of trunk.

Check the history

Now, in either case, you should check that the history is sensible and you have the right commits:

git log --oneline --graph
git log -p upstream-rw/master..

The first line above just shows the history in a compact way, with a text representation of the history graph. The second line shows the log of commits excluding those that can be reached from trunk (upstream-rw/master), and including those that can be reached from current HEAD (implied with the .. at the end). So, it shows the commits unique to this branch compared to trunk. The -p option shows the diff for these commits in patch form.

Push to trunk

git push upstream-rw my-new-feature:master

This pushes the my-new-feature branch in this repository to the master branch in the upstream-rw repository.

Using Milestones and Labels

These guidelines are adapted from similar guidelines followed by IPython:

  • 100% of confirmed issues and new features should have a milestone
  • Only the following criteria should result in an issue being closed without a milestone:
    • Not actually an issue (user error, etc.)
    • Duplicate of an existing issue
    • A pull request superceded by a new pull request providing an alternate implementation
  • Open issues should only lack a milestone if:
    • More clarification is required
    • Which milestone it belongs in requires some discussion
  • Corollary: When an issue is closed without a milestone that means that the issue will not be fixed, or that it was not a real issue at all.
  • In general there should be the following open milestones:
    • The next bug fix releases for any still-supported version lines; for example if 0.4 is in development and 0.2.x and 0.3.x are still supported there should be milestones for the next 0.2.x and 0.3.x releases.
    • The next X.Y release, ie. the next minor release; this is generally the next release that all development in master is aimed toward.
    • The next X.Y release +1; for example if 0.3 is the next release, there should also be a milestone for 0.4 for issues that are important, but that we know won’t be resolved in the next release.
    • Future–this is for all issues that require attention at some point but for which no immediate solution is in sight.
  • Bug fix release milestones should only be used for deferring issues that won’t be fixed in the next minor release, or for issues is previous releases that no longer apply to the mainline.
  • When in doubt about which milestone to use for an issue, use the next minor release–it can always be moved once it’s been more closely reviewed prior to release.
  • Active milestones associated with a specific release (eg. v0.3.0) should contain at least one issue with the release label representing the actual task for releasing that version (this also works around the GitHub annoyance that milestones without any open issues are automatically closed).
  • Issues that require fixing in the mainline, but that also are confirmed to apply to supported stable version lines should be marked with one or more backport-* labels for each v0.X.Y branch that has the issue.
    • In some cases it may require extra work beyond a simple merge to port bug fixes to older lines of development; if such additional work is required it is not a bad idea to open a “Backport #nnn to v0.X.Y” issue in the appropriate v0.X.Y milestone.