I am really looking forward to using the new Maven JGit-Flow Plugin by Atlassian
.
At the moment, we’re following the git flow branching structure, with master, develop and feature branches. But we’re not using git flow for releases. Our release process is as follows:
- Create release/1.0.0 branch.
- Set version on develop branch to 1.1.0-SNAPSHOT
- Push to origin
- QA and final bug fixing on release branch
- Merge to master
- Maven Release on master branch
- Merge to develop
This was the most we could streamline the process. It ensures we don’t release something which can’t merge to master.
(I should admit: sometimes we skip the release branch and merge straight from develop to master when we are ready for a release.)
Anyway, really hoping that the Atlassian plugin does away with all these manual steps. It looks like it will. The only thing it doesn’t seem to do is bump the version on the develop branch as soon as the release branch has been created. There’s a discussion here: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/maven-jgitflow-plugin/issue/16/develop-version-on-release
I think it’s really important to do this. If work continues on the develop branch whilst release QA is underway, both the develop branch and the release branch will be installing snapshots with the same version number and different functionality. I’m sure this could lead to confusion somewhere, especially with multi-module projects. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the git flow module says you should bump the version on develop after release-start, but of course I can’t find it now. The only argument I can see for not bumping is what happens if you decide not to release, but don’t see it as a problem to miss a minor version number, and if it was, it’;s easy to use the Maven Versions plugin to reset the version on develop. This will be the minority case, so I think the plugin should cater first for the normal case when the release goes ahead.
I’d be interested to know when other developers bump the version on the develop branch? Either way, I’ll certainly be trying out the plugin when I next need to do some releasing.
