Branching Strategy

This document attempts to capture the details of our branching strategy for Puppet Server. This information is up-to-date as of 2015-05-21.

Puppet Server Branches

Similar to most of the other projects at Puppet Labs, there should generally only be two branches that are relevant at all in the puppet-server github repo: master and stable.

In the case of Puppet Server, the stable branch maps to the 1.x series of OSS Puppet Server releases. These releases are compatible with Puppet 3.x.

The master branch maps to the 2.x series of OSS Puppet Server releases. The 2.0 release is compatible with Puppet 4.x as part of Puppet Collection 1 (PC1). The forthcoming 2.1 release and later are intended to be compatible with Puppet 3.x and Puppet 4.x. Puppet 3.x is supported for remote agents only, only Puppet 4.x satisfies the package dependency between Puppet Server and Puppet.

Important Notes About Upcoming Releases

At the time of this writing, we're preparing for the release of OSS 1.1.0 and 2.1.0. The two releases are intended to be roughly equivalent to each other in terms of functionality, with the primary differences being around support for Puppet 4.x compatibility in Puppet Server 2.1. The 2.1.0 release will include a URL compatibility layer that will allow Puppet 3.x agents to talk to Puppet Server 2.x. For more info, see https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/SERVER-526.

The stable and master branches are essentially frozen with the exception of any critical fixes which would otherwise block delivery of the 1.1 and/or 2.1 releases.

In summary:

• stable is for work to be done toward the 1.1 release.
• master is for work to be done toward the 2.1 release.

"Normal" branching workflow

Under normal circumstances, the stable branch will be used for bugfix releases off of the last stable "Y" release. PRs should only be targeted at stable if they are intended to go out in a z/bugfix release, and all code merged into the stable branch should be merged up to the master branch at regular intervals.

Most PRs should normally be targeted at the master branch, which is where feature work will be going on for the next X/Y release.

Ideally, as soon as a new x/major release is shipped (e.g. Puppet Server 2.0), that would become the stable branch and there would be no additional planned 1.x releases. Because of the drastic nature of the changes between Puppet 3 and Puppet 4, it's possible that we'll need to continue to do both 1.x and 2.x releases of Puppet Server for some period of time.