[Release Engineering] Reconsider how we organise our code and cut our releases

[vladbailescu]

Currently we've been relying on having two main branches master (which follows the changes from the latest releases and allows quick/hotfix releases) and development (which serves as an integration branch for all features and fixes).

Synchronising changes between the two branches is a pain as sometimes commits from development need to be cherry-picked manually to master before we do a release and doing a merge afterwards will result in duplication of commits.

We need a better way to manage this process and the alternatives so far are:

1. Use something similar to gitflow

• Keep development as the main branch used for integration of feature branches and fixes.
• Keep master as a hotfix branch that always tracks the latest release.
• Cut regular release branches from development, release from the release branch and merge back changes into both master and development
• Cut hotfix release branches from master, release from the release branch and merge back changes to both master and development

2. Use trunk-based development

See https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery/continuous-integration/trunk-based-development

• Keep only one trunk and integration branch, which we could name main
• Cut regular release branches from main, release from this branch and merge back changes into main
• Cut hotfix release branches from the latest release tags, release from this branch and merge back changes into main

[vladbailescu]

We discussed inside the team that we want to cut release 2.18.0 from the development branch. Going further we will attempt to use trunk-based development and we will:

1. Rename development branch to main
2. Drop master branch
3. Continue to use feature/... branches for longer-running feature development. Try to integrate frequently from main branch.
4. Cut regular releases from development to release/... branches, merge changes after release back to main.
5. Cut hotfix releases from the previous release tag to release/... branches, merge changes after release back to main.
6. Adjust as needed ;)