Enable releases from support branches

[hugoduncan]

We've used support branches fairly heavily, and miss the ability to have git flow release work sanely on these. A release from a support branch should not merge to the release branch.

Does it make sense for git flow release to work on a feature branch, by creating a release branch and merging the release back into the support branch on git flow release finish?

[baby-gnu]

Hello,

I think this could be quite hard to achieve.

If you derived a release branch from a support branch, how do you know you must merge back in the support branch instead of following the default workflow?

I wonder if such branches do not deserve subcommands, like

git flow support release start
git flow support release finish

git flow support hotfix start
git flow support hotfix finish

With configured prefix for such branches that do not fall under already configured prefix.

We may even use subcommands to make hotfix on release branches:

git flow release hotfix start
git flow release hotfix finish

Regards.

[hugoduncan]

git flow support release start and git flow support release finish would be fine :)

[atian25]

+1 for this

[baby-gnu]

I'll make some implementation test based on Peter van der Does fork.

I have the idea of factorizing the code with actual git-flow-hotfix and git-flow-release and this could be a start to derive support branches into development lines like proposed in #281.

Regards.

[petervanderdoes]

@baby-gnu Please wait with the coding. I have another idea that may actually solve this in another way, See: petervanderdoes/gitflow-avh#43

@hugoduncan Can you tell me how you use the Support branches? You are one of the 1st people I have heard that use support branches extensively.

[hugoduncan]

@petervanderdoes I have an infrastructure automation project, https://palletops.com, https://github.com/pallet/pallet, that requires maintenance of previous releases. Currently I use develop is for the next major version of pallet, while still supporting the current release version on the support/0.7.x branch. There are still some fixes that get backported to the support/0.6.x branch (though non recently).

[petervanderdoes]

@hugoduncan Thanks, that's what I believed that support branches were supposed to be. I will work on the petervanderdoes#43 and that way you can do hotfixes, features, releases from support branches as well.

[hugoduncan]

@petervanderdoes that would be fantastic! and certainly seems to be the "right" way of doing it.