Development/Tutorials/Git/Feature Development Workflow
Some KDE Components have adopted an integration-staging-origin policy for pushing features into KDE's repositories. This document is designed to get developers started with this workflow and understand the steps involved.
Repositories and projects complying with this policy
The following repositories/projects follow these guidelines. Any project not mentioned here is unaffected by what described
- kde-workspace
- kde-runtime
- kdelibs (plasma only)
Rationale
This approach is meant to implement proper quality evaluation into the main repositories, still allowing developers to work on anything they want, and providing a sane merging strategy which does not require any specific knowledge from the developer's side.
This is achieved by using two separate repositories. One is origin, the official project repository, where just maintainers are allowed to push, apart from special cases. The other is integration, where work in progress happens, and everyone can create branches and work on that.
There are two separate figures: developers and maintainers. Developers are people who want to work on features on a specific repositories, maintainers are the gatekeepers for those repositories. Please note the purpose of the maintainer is purely organizational: no special power over technical decision is given to maintainers.
A developer would provide his code into a remote branch in integration: as soon as this code is ready and reviewed, the maintainer would take care of merging into integration/master first, prepare for staging in integration/staging, and finally merge into master when needed.