Branch protection

[goastler]

We need some form of branch protection for the dev branch. @MatthewMiddlehurst accidentally deleted the dev branch earlier this week and managed to recover it (phew!). To prevent this from happening again, we need some kind of protection over the important branches. Master is already protected.

On github, to protect a branch you have to make a branch protection rule. I made a rule for master which is why you can't push directly to it. We have two options for dev:

1. make an empty rule which stops accidental deletion / renaming / etc
2. protect dev in the same way as master, preventing pushing unless via pull request. This is a popular option to maintain a clean dev version, but comes at the cost / pain of having to do pull requests every time (although I think it's a good idea)

We at the very least need option 1, would like some feedback on option 2 :)

[TonyBagnall]

yes I agree, I have been working directly off dev and the above explains some weirdness I've seen. I think we just go (2) and I stop working directly in dev! But if travis checks pass, we should be able to merge our own pull requests.

[TonyBagnall]

George, can you sort this out? ta

[james-large]

I think 2, but hat's been my workflow anyway so no change for me, mainly in short term inconveniences e.g. Tony. Would the branch protection apply to peoples local dev too? i.e. could code be committed to local dev, only to be denied when trying to push to remote dev?

[ABostrom]

I think 2 as well.

If we all have our own sub-devs. (aaron-dev/ tony-dev etc) then PR the bits we want into dev as we go it will be much safer imo.

[TonyBagnall]

yes 2 with travis checks but with no approval required other than passing checks

[goastler]

Great, I'm happy with option 2 also :)

However, I'm not an admin on the repo so I think only @TonyBagnall can sort it out (sorry!). If you let me know when you're next free Tony I can drop by and apply the branch protection with you :)

[goastler]

Also yes, no review necessary so we can merge our own PRs

[TonyBagnall]

can we do this next weds? Thats when Im next in

[goastler]

Sorted