Gridcoin development tree
Gridcoin is a PoS-based cryptocurrency.
Developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests to the development branch when they think their feature or bug fix is ready.
The patch will be accepted if there is broad consensus that it is a good thing. Developers should expect to rework and resubmit patches if they don't match the project's coding conventions (see coding.txt) or are controversial.
The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be completely stable. Tags are regularly created to indicate new stable release versions of Gridcoin.
Feature branches are created when there are major new features being worked on by several people.
From time to time a pull request will become outdated. If this occurs, and the pull is no longer automatically mergeable; a comment on the pull will be used to issue a warning of closure. The pull will be closed 15 days after the warning if action is not taken by the author. Pull requests closed in this manner will have their corresponding issue labeled 'stagnant'.
Issues with no commits will be given a similar warning, and closed after 15 days from their last activity. Issues closed in this manner will be labeled 'stale'.
Gridcoin uses three branches to ensure stability without slowing down the pace of the daily development activities; development, staging and master.
The development branch is used for day-to-day activities. It is the most active branch and is where pull requests go by default. This branch may contain code which is not yet stable or ready for production, so it should only be executed on testnet to avoid disrupting fellow Gridcoiners. Using this branch is the equivalence of alpha testing.
When a decision has been made that the development branch should be moving towards a final release it is merged to staging where no new development takes place. This branch is purely to stabilize the code base and squash out bugs rained down from development. Using this is close to beta testing.
Once the staging branch is stable and runs smoothly it is merged to master and a release is made available to the public. At this point the code is considered mature and ready for production.