A note from the maintainer

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the
mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be
seen by any human being.  Spam filters learned that legitimate
messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses
that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to
be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time
(i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but
"Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Libera Chat.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.40 done on Mar 13rd, 2023.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues, but things like embargoed security fixes may
first appear in the maintenance tracks and merged up to "master" at
the same time.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more, but can be used by contributors to anticipate what topics from
others may cause conflict with your work, and find people who are working.
on these topics to talk to before the potential conflicts get out of
control. The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.  Using the tip of this branch, instead of
'next', as your daily driver is also recommended.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the
mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be
seen by any human being.  Spam filters learned that legitimate
messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses
that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to
be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time
(i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but
"Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Libera Chat.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.38 done on Oct 3rd, 2022.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues, but things like embargoed security fixes may
first appear in the maintenance tracks and merged up to "master" at
the same time.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.38.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.38" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the
mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be
seen by any human being.  Spam filters learned that legitimate
messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses
that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to
be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time
(i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but
"Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Libera Chat.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.38 done on Oct 3rd, 2022.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues, but things like embargoed security fixes may
first appear in the maintenance tracks and merged up to "master" at
the same time.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the
mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be
seen by any human being.  Spam filters learned that legitimate
messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses
that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to
be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time
(i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but
"Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Libera Chat.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.37 done on June 27th, 2022.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues, but things like embargoed security fixes may
first appear in the maintenance tracks and merged up to "master" at
the same time.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the
mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be
seen by any human being.  Spam filters learned that legitimate
messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses
that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to
be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time
(i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but
"Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Libera Chat.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.37 done on June 27th, 2022.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the
mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be
seen by any human being.  Spam filters learned that legitimate
messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses
that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to
be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time
(i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but
"Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Libera Chat.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.36 done on Apr 18th, 2022.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any message to this address unless it also goes to the
mailing list, because it is likely that such a message will not be
seen by any human being.  Spam filters learned that legitimate
messages to the address come only from a very few sender addresses
that are known to be good, and messages from all others are likely to
be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing list at the same time
(i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would reach the mailbox, but
"Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on FreeNode (historically, but
the IRC situation is in flux at the moment).  Their logs are available
at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.35 done on Jan 24th, 2022.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on FreeNode (historically, but
the IRC situation is in flux at the moment).  Their logs are available
at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four "integration" branches in git.git repository that track
the source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".  They
however almost never get new commits made directly on them.  Instead,
a branch is forked from either "master" or "maint" for each "topic",
whether it is a new feature or fix for a bug, and holds a set of
commits that belong to the same theme, and then such a "topic branch"
is merged to these integration branches.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.33 done on August 16th, 2021.  You can
expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than
any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are merged to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually these fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g.
"2.29.2" was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the "maint" branch.  It is merged into
"master" primarily to propagate the description in the release notes
forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on FreeNode (historically, but
the IRC situation is in flux at the moment).  Their logs are available
at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.32 done on June 6th, 2021.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.29.2"
was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Bagas Sanjaya]

On 27/03/21 05.53, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Welcome to the Git development community.
> 
> This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
> project is managed, and how you can work with it.
> 
> The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
> do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
> that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
> learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
> few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
> others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
> list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
> reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
> folder).
> 
> 
> * Mailing list and the community
> 
> The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
> requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
> the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
> subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
> everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
> I am not subscribed".
> 
> As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
> that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
> GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.
> 
> Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
> and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
> project convention.
> 
> If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
> several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
> but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
> do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
> getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
> your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
> right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
> becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.
> 
> The list archive is available at a few public sites:
> 
>          http://lore.kernel.org/git/
>          http://marc.info/?l=git
>          http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/
> 
> For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:
> 
> 	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
>          nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
> 
> are available.
> 
> When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
> message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
> so, like this:
> 
> 	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org
> 
> Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
> stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
> message in the Git list).
> 
> Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
> the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
> available at:
> 
>          http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
>          http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel
> 
> There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
> News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).
> 
> Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
> organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
> liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.
> 
> For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
> towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
> tree, or:
> 
>      https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
> 
> 
> * Reporting bugs
> 
> When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
> your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
> way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
> in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
> correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
> that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
> to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.
> 
> Please remember to always state
> 
>   - what you wanted to achieve;
> 
>   - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
>     the behavior);
> 
>   - what you saw happen (X above);
> 
>   - what you expected to see (Y above); and
> 
>   - how the last two are different.
> 
> See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
> hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
> make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.
> 
> If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
> it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
> our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
> a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
> vulnerabilities, including:
> 
>    - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
>    - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
>    - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people
> 
> where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
> leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.
> 
> 
> * Repositories and documentation.
> 
> My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:
> 
>    https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
>    https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
>    https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
>    https://github.com/git/git/
>    https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/
> 
> This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
> individual topics broken out:
> 
>    https://github.com/gitster/git/
> 
> A few web interfaces are found at:
> 
>    http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
>    https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
>    http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git
> 
> Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
> found in:
> 
>    https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
>    https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
>    https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
> 
> The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
> viewed online at:
> 
>    https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html
> 
> 
> * How various branches are used.
> 
> There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
> of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".
> 
> The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
> ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
> "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
> named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
> switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
> three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").
> 
> The last such release was 2.31 done on Mar 15th, 2021.  You can expect
> that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
> the released versions.
> 
> Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
> "master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
> release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
> from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
> several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
> of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
> four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
> to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
> feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
> incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.29.2"
> was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).
> 
> New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
> primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.
> 
> A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
> series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
> branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
> when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
> there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
> topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.
> 
> Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
> general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
> not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
> breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
> topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
> is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
> "next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
> the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".
> 
> The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
> remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
> is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
> and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
> please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
> branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
> in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
> more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
> or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
> was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".
> 
> You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
> currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
> to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
> The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
> early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
> are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
> maintainer for his daily work.
> 
> The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
> usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
> "master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
> using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
> Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
> get ejected from "next" when this happens.
> 
> A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
> is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
> by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
> and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
> incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
> patches and how the problem was corrected.
> 
> Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
> release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
> needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
> or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
> fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".
> 
> 
> * Other people's trees.
> 
> Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
> should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
> and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.
> 
> Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
> own authoritative repository and maintainers:
> 
>   - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:
> 
>          https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git
> 
>   - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:
> 
>          git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk
> 
>   - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:
> 
> 	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/
> 
> When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
> please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
> even have different directory structures).
> 
Grazie Junio for this message note.

I would like to see the note above in CONTRIBUTING.md, because new
contributors will most likely read CONTRIBUTING.md rather than searching
this ML archive for the note.

-- 
An old man doll... just what I always wanted! - Clara

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.31 done on Mar 15th, 2021.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.29.2"
was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.31 done on Mar 15th, 2021.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.29.2"
was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  https://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://gitlab.com/git-vcs/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  https://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.30 done on Dec 28th, 2020.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.29.2"
was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.  Our `git bugreport` tool gives you a handy way you can use to
make sure you do not forget these points when filing a bug report.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.29 done on Oct 19th, 2020.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.29.2"
was the second maintenance release for the "2.29" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

[Administrivia]
    As I sent the latest issue of the "What's cooking" report
    yesterday, and there is no change other than the "v0
    repositories take any extensions known to us for now" regression
    fixes in today's rc1, I am not sending a new "What's cooking"
    out, even though we tagged 2.28.0-rc1 today.  Instead, I'll send
    this one out, as it has been a while...


Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

The current maintainer is Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; please
do not send any private message to this address, because it is likely
that such a message will not be seen by any human being.  Spam filters
learned that legitimate messages to the address come only from a very
few sender addresses that are known to be good, and messages from all
others are likely to be spam unless they are also sent to the mailing
list at the same time (i.e. "Reply-all" to the list message would
reach the mailbox, but "Reply" will likely be thrown into the spam
folder).


* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "seen".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.27 done on Jun 1st, 2020.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.26.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.26" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "seen" (formerly "pu", proposed updates) branch bundles all the
remaining topic branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There
is no guarantee that the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any
and all topics that are remotely promising from the list traffic, so
please do not read too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "seen"
branch.  This branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics
in them may turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing
more.  The topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested,
or well documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that
was in "seen" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..seen" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "seen" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "seen" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "seen") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "seen" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com> writes:

> On 01-06-2020 22:03, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> 
>> There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
>> News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).
>>
>
> It seems the Rev News page has moved to:
>
>     https://git.github.io/rev_news/index.html
>
> The following works too:
>
>     https://git.github.io/rev_news

Thanks.  I am on "vacation", so will address this later in the week.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Kaartic Sivaraam]

Hi Junio,

On 01-06-2020 22:03, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
> News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).
>

It seems the Rev News page has moved to:

    https://git.github.io/rev_news/index.html

The following works too:

    https://git.github.io/rev_news

> 
> * Reporting bugs
> 
> When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
> your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
> way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
> in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
> correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
> that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
> to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.
> 
> Please remember to always state
> 
>  - what you wanted to achieve;
> 
>  - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
>    the behavior);
> 
>  - what you saw happen (X above);
> 
>  - what you expected to see (Y above); and
> 
>  - how the last two are different.
> 
> See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
> hints.
> 

I wonder if it might be worth mentioning `git bugreport` somewhere here.

> When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
> please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
> even have different directory structures).
> 

Thanks for routinely sending these informative notes! :)

-- 
Sivaraam

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://lore.kernel.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://nntp.lore.kernel.org/org.kernel.vger.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://lore.kernel.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.

For our expectations on the behaviour of the community participants
towards each other, see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md at the top level of the source
tree, or:

    https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but we have
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.27 done on Jun 1st, 2020.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.26.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.26" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.
Some topics that used to be in "next" during the previous cycle may
get ejected from "next" when this happens.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pratyush Yadav:

        https://github.com/prati0100/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

[jc: as I said earlier, I'll be offline for a week, but remembered
that I haven't sent this out for a while---I tried to make a habit
of sending this message out after every feature release, and we had
one recently, so it is a good time to send one from the airport
lounge before I fly out.]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are (mirrored) at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.15 done on Oct 30th, 2017.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  It is merged into "master"
primarily to propagate the description in the release notes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

As an anti-spam measure, the mailing list software rejects messages
that are not text/plain and drops them on the floor.  If you are a
GMail user, you'd want to make sure "Plain text mode" is checked.

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.15 done on Oct 30th, 2017.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Junio,

On Mon, 30 Oct 2017, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
> requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
> the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
> subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
> everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
> I am not subscribed".

I have heard about a dozen complaints that mails were simply eaten by the
mailing list. At least some of those cases were due to HTML (or
HTML/plain) mails being quietly dropped, and it caused more than just
minor frustration.

Maybe mention this in your maintainer's note, to help stave off such
problems?

Ciao,
Dscho

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.15 done on Oct 30th, 2017.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.14 done on Aug 4th, 2017.  You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.12 done on Feb 24th, 2017. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.12 done on Feb 24th, 2017. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.12 done on Feb 24th, 2017. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

This one shows not just the main integration branches, but also
individual topics broken out:

  git://github.com/gitster/git/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.12 done on Feb 24th, 2017. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.12.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.12" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" (or somewhere older, especially
when the topic is about fixing an earlier bug) and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.12 done on Feb 24th, 2017. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.11.1"
was the first maintenance release for the "2.11" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

A natural consequence of how "next" and "pu" bundles topics together
is that until a topic is merged to "next", updates to it is expected
by replacing the patch(es) in the topic with an improved version,
and once a topic is merged to "next", updates to it needs to come as
incremental patches, pointing out what was wrong in the previous
patches and how the problem was corrected.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.11 done on Nov 29th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.10.2"
is the second maintenance release for the "2.10" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.10 done on Sep 2nd, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.9.3"
is the third maintenance release for the "2.9" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.
The output of the above "git log" talks about a "jch" branch, which is an
early part of the "pu" branch; that branch contains all topics that
are in "next" and a bit more (but not all of "pu") and is used by the
maintainer for his daily work.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

> W dniu 03.09.2016 o 04:17, Junio C Hamano pisze:
>
>> Please remember to always state
>> 
>>  - what you wanted to achieve;
>> 
>>  - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
>>    the behavior);
>
> I wonder if it be worth adding to not use aliases (or expand them).  I have
> seen quite a few such questions on StackOverflow...

    - how others can reproduce what you did (the version of git and
      the command sequence);

perhaps?

>> 
>>  - what you saw happen (X above);
>> 
>>  - what you expected to see (Y above); and
>> 
>>  - how the last two are different.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Jakub Narębski]

W dniu 03.09.2016 o 04:17, Junio C Hamano pisze:

> Please remember to always state
> 
>  - what you wanted to achieve;
> 
>  - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
>    the behavior);

I wonder if it be worth adding to not use aliases (or expand them).  I have
seen quite a few such questions on StackOverflow...

> 
>  - what you saw happen (X above);
> 
>  - what you expected to see (Y above); and
> 
>  - how the last two are different.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git
        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

are available.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.10 done on Sep 2nd, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.9.3"
is the third maintenance release for the "2.9" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Eric Wong]

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> wrote:
> From: "Eric Wong" <e@80x24.org>
> >
> >Yes, I was somewhat careful to check for proper mboxes from gmane;
> >I just missed entire ranges :x
> >
> 
> There were a number of messages that were listed by gmane as being in the
> various Git for Windows lists such as msysgit, especially when the messages
> went to both lists (as the issue had common cause) that failed to get onto
> the regualr gmane list.
> 
> Are these something that has been included?

If they were on both lists, yes, gmane seems to miss some of
those messages, unfortunately.

> Philip
> 
> A quick search on a possible message gave
> https://public-inbox.org/git/55BF6808.1000500@web.de/ which has no parent,
> but that parent actually only went to the msysgit list, so no real surprise
> there, but I do remember some other cases that were on list - I just can't
> find them at the moment :-(.

If a message was only posted exclusively on other lists, it
should stay there and it's archives.  public-inbox provides a
way to lookup external messages by Message-ID for this reason.

Is there a way to lookup messages by Message-ID from the msysgit
archives?  I could add it to the existing list of alternate
Message-ID lookup services:

  https://public-inbox.org/meta/20160814054731.26194-1-e@80x24.org/

GoogleGroups doesn't seem usable without JavaScript at all,
unfortunately :<

I don't think the msysgit archives would be too large and I
wouldn't mind hosting them myself.  But, users on GoogleGroups
may not be used to our conventions and not appreciate having
their unobfuscated addresses exposed or reply-to-all...

I will probably add an option to support centralized lists to
public-inbox sometime, though.  I don't like centralization,
but completely inaccessible archives are worse.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Philip Oakley]

From: "Eric Wong" <e@80x24.org>
>
> Yes, I was somewhat careful to check for proper mboxes from gmane;
> I just missed entire ranges :x
>

There were a number of messages that were listed by gmane as being in the 
various Git for Windows lists such as msysgit, especially when the messages 
went to both lists (as the issue had common cause) that failed to get onto 
the regualr gmane list.

Are these something that has been included?

Philip

A quick search on a possible message gave 
https://public-inbox.org/git/55BF6808.1000500@web.de/ which has no parent, 
but that parent actually only went to the msysgit list, so no real surprise 
there, but I do remember some other cases that were on list - I just can't 
find them at the moment :-(.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Jeff King]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 02:12:34AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

> Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:
> > Thanks, should all be imported.
> 
> Oops, missed one which was missing X-Mailing-List (causing
> it to not get imported) and had "X-No-Archive: yes" set;
> which meant I couldn't get it from gmane this year.
> 
> Hmm... XNAY defeats the point of public-inbox (and probably the
> point of public-to-all mailing lists); so I don't think it's
> worth honoring.

I didn't even think to look for that header. It looks like it's
basically all one guy. I would argue that it should not be honored for
the git dev list, if only because those emails are a record of the
provenance of patches. The Signed-off-by is a certification that the
patch is OK to submit, but it's presumably worth more with an audit
trail including the email headers.

(Also, I have always found it a little silly to post publicly with a
"please don't anybody record this!" header).

-Peff

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Jeff King]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 01:27:06AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

> What's also interesting about the thread you highlighed is the
> extra '<>' when you started that thread; and I have a bug where
> I strip off an extra '>' which needs to be fixed...

Oh, that's interesting. It's not in the message that started the thread;
the bug is in the in-reply-to headers of the patches themselves. I don't
remember what I was using to send patches back then. It might have been
send-email, and I suspect I did:

  git send-email --in-reply-to='<whatever>'

after cutting-and-pasting '<whatever>' from the cover letter.

> I wonder if I should make "editorial" changes to fixup user bugs,
> but then there's also bunch of messages which are replies to <y>
> because git-send-email had usability problems back in the day...

I wouldn't go too far in editorial changes. I made a few when skimming
the messages I just sent for spam, and dropped some empty messages, or
"unsubscribe me" ones. But it's not worth the human effort to go back
and scrub list archives from 10 years ago.

Fixing up an extra "<>" is easily done once in your parsing scripts,
though, and I'd be surprised if I'm the only one to have made that
mistake.

> The one which started the thread belonging to
> <loom.20100716T103549-783@post.gmane.org> was really iffy,

I think I exercised editorial control over similar "your software is now
listed in our archive!" messages in what I sent. But yeah, there's going
to be some spam and some cruft in the archive. It's just a fact of life.
The solution is good searching and organizing tools to find the signal
you're looking for, not to make sure the noise hits zero.

>   git cat-file blob HEAD:b7/5bb577d76487bc9aebf0656d4e03eff22049f4
> 
> is totally legit, but doesn't seem to show up properly,

Heh, yeah, I saw that one (and I think it broke some of my initial
scripting, which foolishly assumed nobody had message-ids with spaces in
them).

-Peff

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Eric Wong]

Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:
> Thanks, should all be imported.

Oops, missed one which was missing X-Mailing-List (causing
it to not get imported) and had "X-No-Archive: yes" set;
which meant I couldn't get it from gmane this year.

Hmm... XNAY defeats the point of public-inbox (and probably the
point of public-to-all mailing lists); so I don't think it's
worth honoring.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Eric Wong]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> I collected the message-ids from my archive. Interestingly, I had a
> dozen or so that did not have message-ids at all. I think most of them
> are from patches that put the "From " line in the body, like this one:
> 
>   http://public-inbox.org/git/20070311033833.GB10781@spearce.org/
> 
> and then they got corrupted on a round-trip through one of the bad mbox
> formats (probably downloading from gmane, I'd guess; the export there
> uses mbox, and I use maildir myself, so it probably got split badly
> years ago). Anyway, public-inbox seems to get this case right, which is
> good.

Yes, I was somewhat careful to check for proper mboxes from gmane;
I just missed entire ranges :x

What's also interesting about the thread you highlighed is the
extra '<>' when you started that thread; and I have a bug where
I strip off an extra '>' which needs to be fixed...

I wonder if I should make "editorial" changes to fixup user bugs,
but then there's also bunch of messages which are replies to <y>
because git-send-email had usability problems back in the day...

> I had several hundred message ids that you didn't. About half of them
> were spam or other junk. I weeded them out manually (mostly by picking
> through the subjects, so possibly there's some error). The end result is
> 279 messages that I think are legitimate that you don't have.
> 
> I'll send them to you off-list, as the mbox is about 300K, which the
> list will reject.

Thanks, should all be imported.

The one which started the thread belonging to
<loom.20100716T103549-783@post.gmane.org> was really iffy,
but I kept it; as well as an "unsubscribe" one; I guess those
people are shamed for life :)


  git cat-file blob HEAD:b7/5bb577d76487bc9aebf0656d4e03eff22049f4

is totally legit, but doesn't seem to show up properly,
so there's another bug I need to fix.  For the moment, the
following also works:

	public-inbox.org/git/b75bb577d76487bc9aebf0656d4e03eff22049f4/
(but I guess it was reposted as <26299.4828321554$1213013668@news.gmane.org>

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Jeff King]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 09:04:32AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

> > Is there an easy way to get _just_ the list of message-ids you are
> > storing (I know I can download the whole archive, but it's big)?
> 
> XHDR (or HDR) over NNTP should do it (that's how I checked
> against gmane):
> --------8<-----
> use Net::NNTP;
> my $nntp = Net::NNTP->new($ENV{NNTPSERVER} || 'news.public-inbox.org');
> my ($num, $first, $last) = $nntp->group('inbox.comp.version-control.git');
> my $batch = 10000;
> my $i;
> for ($i = $first; $i < $last; $i += $batch) {
> 	my $j = $i + $batch - 1;
> 	$j = $last if $j > $last;
> 	my $num2mid = $nntp->xhdr('Message-ID', "$i-$j");
> 	for my $n ($i..$j) {
> 		defined(my $mid = $num2mid->{$n}) or next;
> 		print "$mid\n";
> 	}
> }

Thanks, that's perfect.

I collected the message-ids from my archive. Interestingly, I had a
dozen or so that did not have message-ids at all. I think most of them
are from patches that put the "From " line in the body, like this one:

  http://public-inbox.org/git/20070311033833.GB10781@spearce.org/

and then they got corrupted on a round-trip through one of the bad mbox
formats (probably downloading from gmane, I'd guess; the export there
uses mbox, and I use maildir myself, so it probably got split badly
years ago). Anyway, public-inbox seems to get this case right, which is
good.

I had several hundred message ids that you didn't. About half of them
were spam or other junk. I weeded them out manually (mostly by picking
through the subjects, so possibly there's some error). The end result is
279 messages that I think are legitimate that you don't have.

I'll send them to you off-list, as the mbox is about 300K, which the
list will reject.

-Peff

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Eric Wong]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 10:42:55PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
> > Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > > is still available.  An alternative
> > > 
> > >         nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
> > > 
> > > will become usable once it catches up with old messages.
> > 
> > Mostly caught up, I injected 33 more today which were
> > cross-posted (which tripped up some of my anti-spam rules) or
> > simply missed by gmane.
> > 
> > There may be more in some personal archives gmane doesn't
> > have...
> 
> Is there an easy way to get _just_ the list of message-ids you are
> storing (I know I can download the whole archive, but it's big)?

XHDR (or HDR) over NNTP should do it (that's how I checked
against gmane):
--------8<-----
use Net::NNTP;
my $nntp = Net::NNTP->new($ENV{NNTPSERVER} || 'news.public-inbox.org');
my ($num, $first, $last) = $nntp->group('inbox.comp.version-control.git');
my $batch = 10000;
my $i;
for ($i = $first; $i < $last; $i += $batch) {
	my $j = $i + $batch - 1;
	$j = $last if $j > $last;
	my $num2mid = $nntp->xhdr('Message-ID', "$i-$j");
	for my $n ($i..$j) {
		defined(my $mid = $num2mid->{$n}) or next;
		print "$mid\n";
	}
}

# and I forgot to optimize XHDR/HDR further in public-inbox-nntpd.
# Oh well, it seems to work, at least.

> Then I can cross-reference with my archive. I doubt I'll have anything
> significant that you don't. My archive of the early days was pulled from
> gmane, though I have been collecting steadily via mailing list delivery
> since 2007 or so.

What's odd is there's some messages with two Message-ID fields
from gmane from the old days, too.  I'll dig a bit another time.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Jeff King]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 10:42:55PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:

> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> > For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:
> > 
> > 	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git
> > 
> > is still available.  An alternative
> > 
> >         nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
> > 
> > will become usable once it catches up with old messages.
> 
> Mostly caught up, I injected 33 more today which were
> cross-posted (which tripped up some of my anti-spam rules) or
> simply missed by gmane.
> 
> There may be more in some personal archives gmane doesn't
> have...

Is there an easy way to get _just_ the list of message-ids you are
storing (I know I can download the whole archive, but it's big)?

Then I can cross-reference with my archive. I doubt I'll have anything
significant that you don't. My archive of the early days was pulled from
gmane, though I have been collecting steadily via mailing list delivery
since 2007 or so.

-Peff

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Eric Wong]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:
> 
> 	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git
> 
> is still available.  An alternative
> 
>         nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git
> 
> will become usable once it catches up with old messages.

Mostly caught up, I injected 33 more today which were
cross-posted (which tripped up some of my anti-spam rules) or
simply missed by gmane.

There may be more in some personal archives gmane doesn't
have...

I've also added NNTP links (including gmane) to the footer in
public-inbox.org/git

> message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
> so, like this:
> 
> 	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Some of the generated links have %40 in them which is the URI
escape for '@'.  I'll make a change to keep the '@' unescaped to
lessen confusion.

Due to the use of SQLite as a stable store for NNTP article
numbers; public-inbox can also do partial matching (up to 100
results, currently) to help correct legitimate mistakes; but I
wouldn't rely on it too much:

	public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://public-inbox.org/git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

	nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

is still available.  An alternative

        nntp://news.public-inbox.org/inbox.comp.version-control.git

will become usable once it catches up with old messages.

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using its
message ID is often the most robust (if not very friendly) way to do
so, like this:

	http://public-inbox.org/git/Pine.LNX.4.58.0504150753440.7211@ppc970.osdl.org

Often these web interfaces accept the message ID with enclosing <>
stripped (like the above example to point at one of the most important
message in the Git list).

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.9 done on June 13th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.9.3"
is the third maintenance release for the "2.9" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

The manual pages formatted in HTML for the tip of 'master' can be
viewed online at:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.9 done on June 13th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.8.3"
is the third maintenance release for the "2.8" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

and rendered in the browser if you visit this page:

  https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git

* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.9 done on June 13th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.8.3"
is the third maintenance release for the "2.8" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.8.0 done on Mar 28th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious and safe fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut
from it.  Usually the fixes are merged to the "master" branch first,
several days before merged to the "maint" branch, to reduce the chance
of last-minute issues.  The maintenance releases used to be named with
four dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates
to (e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5"
feature release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by
incrementing the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.8.3"
is the third maintenance release for the "2.8" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.  This is
a closed list that is limited to people who need to know early about
vulnerabilities, including:

  - people triaging and fixing reported vulnerabilities
  - people operating major git hosting sites with many users
  - people packaging and distributing git to large numbers of people

where these issues are discussed without risk of the information
leaking out before we're ready to make public announcements.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.8.0 done on Mar 28th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.7.4" is the
fourth maintenance release for the "2.7" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.8.0 done on Mar 28th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.7.4" is the
fourth maintenance release for the "2.7" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.7.0 done on Jan 4th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.6.3" is the
third maintenance release for the "2.6" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.info/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git


* How various branches are used.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.7.0 done on Jan 4th, 2016. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.6.3" is the
third maintenance release for the "2.6" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Thanks.  I've known about the URL moving to marc.info for a long
time, and I am kind of surprised that I had this stale one left
un-updated for so long.

Fixed.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Xue Fuqiao]

Hi Junio,

Thanks for writing this note!  It is very helpful.

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 7:14 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> The list archive is available at a few public sites:
>
>         http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
>         http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
>         http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

The second link is broken.  The following link is the correct version
now:

https://marc.info/?l=git

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.6.0 done on Sep 28th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.6.3" is the
third maintenance release for the "2.6" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building & using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have seen.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

When sending proposed updates and fixes to these parts of the system,
please base your patches on these trees, not git.git (the former two
even have different directory structures).

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.6.0 done on Sep 28th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.5.1" is the
fourth maintenance release for the "2.5" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building, using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.5.0 done on Jul 27th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.5.1" is the
fourth maintenance release for the "2.5" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building, using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community ("Git Rev
News" http://git.github.io/rev_news/rev_news.html).

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
  https://github.com/git/git/
  https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
  git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
  git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

  http://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git
  https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
  http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
  https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

  http://git-scm.com/docs/git

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.4.0 done on Apr 30th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.3.4" is the
fourth maintenance release for the "2.3" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".  Please help this process by building, using the
"next" branch for your daily work, and reporting any new bugs you find to
the mailing list, before the breakage is merged down to the "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:

> I am still wondering if it has been truncated on purpose or not.

The document is already too large and people come and go over time.
Maintaining that list becomes time sink, absorbing time better spent
on reviewing and polishing their patches rather than their names in
that list.  Rather than keeping a stale list forever, at some point
I decided to trim and start afresh, perhaps mentioning very notable
contribution from people there if there were any around the time the
message goes out to the list, which hasn't happened.

And with Git Rev News, I probably do not have to worry about it too
much, I hope ;-)

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Christian Couder]

Hi Junio,

On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 9:51 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

[...]

> * Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

It seems strange to me that the above section title still talks about
"trusted lieutenants and credits" ...

> Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
> should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
> and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.
>
> Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
> own authoritative repository and maintainers:
>
>  - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:
>
>         git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git
>
>  - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:
>
>         git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk
>
>  - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:
>
>         https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

... but it looks like there is only the "Other people's trees" part of
the message compared to what used to be in this section.

I am still wondering if it has been truncated on purpose or not.

Thanks anyway,
Christian.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

There is a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community (visit
http://git.github.io/ to find "Git Rev News").  If you want to help
its publication, please contact Christian and/or Thomas.

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

Also GitHub shows the manual pages formatted in HTML (with a
formatting backend different from the one that is used to create the
above) at:

	http://git-scm.com/docs/git

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.4.0 done on Apr 30th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.3.4" is the
fourth maintenance release for the "2.3" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

[jc: I usually do this at the major release, but because we are
seeing many new folks due to GSoC, and also the newsletter is
getting closer to reality, so here is a special edition.]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

We will soon have a volunteer-run newsletter to serve our community
(http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/266066).  If
you want to help its publication, please contact Christian and/or
Thomas.

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.3.0 done on Feb 5th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.3.4" is the
fourth maintenance relaese for "2.3" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

[note to regular readers; there are a few updated paragraphs,
regarding our association with SFC and also our security mailing
list.]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

Git is a member project of software freedom conservancy, a non-profit
organization (https://sfconservancy.org/).  To reach a committee of
liaisons to the conservancy, contact them at <git@sfconservancy.org>.


* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

If you think you found a security-sensitive issue and want to disclose
it to us without announcing it to wider public, please contact us at
our security mailing list <git-security@googlegroups.com>.


* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.3.0 done on Feb 5th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.3.2" is the
second maintenance relaese for "2.3" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.3.0 done on Feb 5th, 2015. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.2.1" will be the
first maintenance relaese for "2.2" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise may be a sign that those who can evaluate
your patch don't have enough mental/time bandwidth to process them
right at the moment, and it often helps to wait until the list traffic
becomes calmer before sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes be found on
the #git and #git-devel IRC channels on Freenode.  Their logs are
available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git
        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git-devel

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch.  They used to be
named with three dotted decimal digits (e.g. "1.8.5"), but recently we
switched the versioning scheme and "feature releases" are named with
three-dotted decimal digits that ends with ".0" (e.g. "1.9.0").

The last such release was 2.2.0 done on Nov 26, 2014. You can expect
that the tip of the "master" branch is always more stable than any of
the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a
feature release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases
are cut from it.  The maintenance releases used to be named with four
dotted decimal, named after the feature release they are updates to
(e.g. "1.8.5.1" was the first maintenance release for "1.8.5" feature
release).  These days, maintenance releases are named by incrementing
the last digit of three-dotted decimal name (e.g. "2.2.1" will be the
first maintenance relaese for "2.2" series).

New features never go to the 'maint' branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches the maintainer happens to have.  There is no guarantee that
the maintainer has enough bandwidth to pick up any and all topics that
are remotely promising from the list traffic, so please do not read
too much into a topic being on (or not on) the "pu" branch.  This
branch is mainly to remind the maintainer that the topics in them may
turn out to be interesting when they are polished, nothing more.  The
topics on this branch aren't usually complete, well tested, or well
documented and they often need further work.  When a topic that was
in "pu" proves to be in a testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged to "next".


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few web interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
	https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they
typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.8.2 done on Mar 13, 2013. You can expect that the tip of
the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.8.1.5.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches.
The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well documented
and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in a
testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they
typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.8.1 done on Dec 31, 2012 (or Jan 1, 2013, depending on
where you were when it happened). You can expect that the tip of the
"master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.8.1.2.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches.
The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well documented
and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in a
testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a
"feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they
typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.8.1 done on Dec 31, 2012 (or Jan 1, 2013, depending on
where you were when it happened). You can expect that the tip of the
"master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.8.0.3.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches.
The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well documented
and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in a
testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.8.0 done on
Oct 21, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.8.0.2.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches.
The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well documented
and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in a
testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.8.0 done on
Oct 21, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.12.4.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward as needed.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic branches.
The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well documented
and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in a
testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.12 done on
Aug 19, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.12.3.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.12 done on
Aug 19, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.12.1.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.12 done on
Aug 19, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.11.5.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.11 done on
Jun 17, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.10.5.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - Jens Lehmann, Heiko Voigt and Lars Hjemli for submodule related
   Porcelains.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

For those who prefer to read it over NNTP (including the maintainer):

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

You can browse the HTML manual pages at:

	http://git-htmldocs.googlecode.com/git/git.html

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.9 done on
Jan 27, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.9.3.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

 - po/ comes from the localization coordinator, Jiang Xin:

	https://github.com/git-l10n/git-po/

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast for helping with general
   design and implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre for helping with packfile design and
   implementation issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras for gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain for git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann, Pete Wyckoff and Luke Diamond for git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe
   Bilotta for maintaining and enhancing gitweb.

 - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason for kicking off the i18n effort, and Jiang
   Xin for volunteering to be the l10n coordinator.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast for
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard for Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to say "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

Some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop
your bug report with just "git does not work".  "I used git in this
way, but it did not work" is not much better, neither is "I used git
in this way, and X happend, which is broken".  It often is that git is
correct to cause X happen in such a case, and it is your expectation
that is broken. People would not know what other result Y you expected
to see instead of X, if you left it unsaid.

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to achieve;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen (X above);

 - what you expected to see (Y above); and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repositories are at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/
	https://github.com/git/git/
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/
	git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git/
	git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core/

A few gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

Preformatted documentation from the tip of the "master" branch can be
found in:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        git://repo.or.cz/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://code.google.com/p/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/
        https://github.com/gitster/git-{htmldocs,manpages}.git/

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.9 done on
Jan 27, 2012. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.8.4.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out. The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid, but is expected to work more or less without major
breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place. A
topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before it
is merged to "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast on general design and
   implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann and Pete Wyckoff on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast on
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to ask "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop your
bug report with just "git does not work".  "I tried to do X but it did not
work" is not much better, neither is "I tried to do X and git did Y, which
is broken".  It often is that what you expect is _not_ what other people
expect, and chances are that what you expect is very different from what
people who have worked on git have expected (otherwise, the behavior
would have been changed to match that expectation long time ago).

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to do;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen;

 - what you expected to see; and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git
	https://github.com/git/git
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter two (there are a
few other mirrors I push into at sourceforge and github as well).

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "html", "man", and "todo".

The "html" and "man" are preformatted documentation from the tip of
the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is visible at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
	http://git-core.googlecode.com/git-history/html/git.html

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it may have
links to documentation of older releases.

The "todo" branch was originally meant to contain a TODO list for me,
but is mostly used to keep some helper scripts I use to maintain git.
For example, the script that was used to maintain the two documentation
branches are found there as dodoc.sh, which may be a good demonstration
of how to use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.7 done on
Sept 30, 2011. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.7.1.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out.  The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work more or
less without major breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting
things take place. A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be
expected to stay more stable than any released version).

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast on general design and
   implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann and Pete Wyckoff on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast on
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund, Pat Thoyts and others
   for their effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Martin von Zweigbergk <martin.von.zweigbergk@gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>  - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:
>>
>>        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git
>
> I don't seem to be able to fetch from there. Is it still supposed to be there?

Unfortunately k.org is _slowly_ coming back to life.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Martin von Zweigbergk]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>  - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:
>
>        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I don't seem to be able to fetch from there. Is it still supposed to be there?

Martin

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to ask "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop your
bug report with just "git does not work".  "I tried to do X but it did not
work" is not much better, neither is "I tried to do X and git did Y, which
is broken".  It often is that what you expect is _not_ what other people
expect, and chances are that what you expect is very different from what
people who have worked on git have expected (otherwise, the behavior
would have been changed to match that expectation long time ago).

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to do;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen;

 - what you expected to see; and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/
	git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git
	https://github.com/git/git
	https://code.google.com/p/git-core/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter two (there are a
few other mirrors I push into at sourceforge and github as well).

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "html", "man", and "todo".

The "html" and "man" are preformatted documentation from the tip of
the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is visible at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/
	http://git-core.googlecode.com/git-history/html/git.html

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it may have
links to documentation of older releases.

The "todo" branch was originally meant to contain a TODO list for me,
but is mostly used to keep some helper scripts I use to maintain git.
For example, the script that was used to maintain the two documentation
branches are found there as dodoc.sh, which may be a good demonstration
of how to use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.7 done on
Sept 30, 2011. You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always
more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.6.4.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out.  The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work more or
less without major breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting
things take place. A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be
expected to stay more stable than any released version).

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because
fatal flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast on general design and
   implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann and Pete Wyckoff on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast on
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund and others for their
   effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the Git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to ask "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop your
bug report with just "git does not work".  "I tried to do X but it did not
work" is not much better, neither is "I tried to do X and git did Y, which
is broken".  It often is that what you expect is _not_ what other people
expect, and chances are that what you expect is very different from what
people who have worked on git have expected (otherwise, the behavior
would have been changed to match that expectation long time ago).

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to do;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen;

 - what you expected to see; and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one (there are a
few other mirrors I push into at sourceforge and github as well).

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "html", "man", and "todo".

The "html" and "man" are auto-generated documentation from the tip of
the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at
kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has links to
documentation of older releases.

The "todo" branch was originally meant to contain a TODO list for me,
but is mostly used to keep some helper scripts I use to maintain git.
For example, the script to maintain the two documentation branches are
found there as dodoc.sh, which may be a good demonstration of how to
use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.6 done on
June 26, 2011.  You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is
always more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.6.1.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out.  The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work more or
less without major breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting
things take place. A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be
expected to stay more stable than any released version).

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master", or a
topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because fatal
flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast on general design and
   implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann and Pete Wyckoff on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast on
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund and others for their
   effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A Note from the Maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* Mailing list and the community

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. Help
requests, feature proposals, bug reports and patches should be sent to
the list address <git@vger.kernel.org>.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages.  The convention on the list is to keep
everybody involved on Cc:, so it is unnecessary to ask "Please Cc: me,
I am not subscribed".

Before sending patches, please read Documentation/SubmittingPatches
and Documentation/CodingGuidelines to familiarize yourself with the
project convention.

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting,
but it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please
do not hesitate to send a reminder message in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have
enough mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and
it often helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before
sending such a reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as gmane
newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Some members of the development community can sometimes also be found
on the #git IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

* Reporting bugs

When you think git does not behave as you expect, please do not stop your
bug report with just "git does not work".  "I tried to do X but it did not
work" is not much better, neither is "I tried to do X and git did Y, which
is broken".  It often is that what you expect is _not_ what other people
expect, and chances are that what you expect is very different from what
people who have worked on git have expected (otherwise, the behavior
would have been changed to match that expectation long time ago).

Please remember to always state

 - what you wanted to do;

 - what you did (the version of git and the command sequence to reproduce
   the behavior);

 - what you saw happen;

 - what you expected to see; and

 - how the last two are different.

See http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html for further
hints.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one (there are a
few other mirrors I push into at sourceforge and github as well).

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "html", "man", and "todo".

The "html" and "man" are auto-generated documentation from the tip of
the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at
kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has links to
documentation of older releases.

The "todo" branch was originally meant to contain a TODO list for me,
but is mostly used to keep some helper scripts I use to maintain git.
For example, the script to maintain the two documentation branches are
found there as dodoc.sh, which may be a good demonstration of how to
use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  Every now and then, a "feature
release" is cut from the tip of this branch and they typically are named
with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such release was 1.7.5 done on
Apr 24, 2011.  You can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is
always more stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.4.5.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A new development does not usually happen on "master". When you send a
series of patches, after review on the mailing list, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master" and your patches are queued
there, and kept out of "master" while people test it out.  The quality of
topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list discussions.

Topic branches that are in good shape are merged to the "next" branch. In
general, the "next" branch always contains the tip of "master".  It might
not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work more or
less without major breakage. The "next" branch is where new and exciting
things take place. A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be
expected to stay more stable than any released version).

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remaining topic
branches. The topics on the branch are not complete, well tested, nor well
documented and need further work. When a topic that was in "pu" proves to
be in testable shape, it is merged to "next".

You can run "git log --first-parent master..pu" to see what topics are
currently in flight.  Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out
to be not so good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either.  After a feature release is made from
"master", however, "next" will be rebuilt from the tip of "master"
using the topics that didn't make the cut in the feature release.

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next
release, nor even in any future release.  There were cases that topics
needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master", or a
topic that already was in "next" was reverted from "next" because fatal
flaws were found in it after it was merged.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus Torvalds, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes
   Sixt, Sverre Rabbelier, Michael J Gruber, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy,
   Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason and Thomas Rast on general design and
   implementation issues and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann and Pete Wyckoff on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast on
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund and others for their
   effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Members of the development community can sometimes be found on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. If you have
patches, please send them to the list address (git@vger.kernel.org).
following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages there, and the convention is to Cc:
everybody involved, so you don't even have to say "Please Cc: me, I am
not subscribed".

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but
it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please do not
hesitate to send a reminder message politely in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have enough
mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often
helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a
reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one (there are a
few other mirrors I push into at sourceforge and github as well).

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant to
contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a list and
it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to keep some
helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's cooking"
messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the tip of the
"master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at
kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are found in the
"todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It is a demonstration
of how to use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may add more maintenance
branches (e.g. "maint-1.6.3") if we have hugely backward incompatible
feature updates in the future to keep an older release alive; I may not,
but the distributed nature of git means any volunteer can run a
stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  There could occasionally be
minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs but they are not expected to be
anything major, and more importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every
now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.7.4 done on Jan 30, 2011.  You can expect that the tip of
the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.3.5.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".  A new
development, either initiated by myself or more often by somebody who
found his or her own itch to scratch, does not usually happen on "master",
however.  Instead, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of
"master", and it first is tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups
at this point.  Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are
running ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the tip
of these branches in my public repository, however, partly to keep the
number of branches that downstream developers need to worry about low, and
primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is broken
in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then with some
more work (either by the original contributor's effort or help from other
people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can now be tested by
wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in the latter, better
shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter
category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip of "master".  It
might not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work
more or less without major breakage.  I usually use "next" version of git
for my own work, so it cannot be _that_ broken to prevent me from
integrating and pushing the changes out.  The "next" branch is where new
and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either (this automatically means the topics that have
been merged into "next" are usually not rebased, and you can find the tip
of topic branches you are interested in from the output of "git log
next"). You should be able to safely build on top of them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be
rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics.  The commit
that replaces the tip of the "next" will usually have the identical tree,
but it will have different ancestry from the tip of "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of topic
branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are only in "pu", are
subject to rebasing in general.  By the above definition of how "next"
works, you can tell that this branch will contain quite experimental and
obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it graduates
to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so good and
the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before
it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be expected to stay more
stable than any released version).  Similarly to the above, I do it with
this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release
(being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it is later found seriously
broken and reverted), nor even in any future release.  There even were
cases that topics needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating
to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from git-gui project, maintained by Pat Thoyts:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre, René
   Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes Sixt,
   Sverre Rabbelier and Thomas Rast on general implementation issues
   and reviews on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff, Frank Lichtenheld and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on
   cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong, David D. Kilzer and Sam Vilain on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann and Pete Wyckoff on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, John Hawley, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields, Jonathan Nieder, Michael J Gruber and Thomas Rast on
   documentation (and countless others for proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - David Aguilar and Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool
   (and Theodore Ts'o for creating it in the first place) and git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Erik Faye-Lund and others for their
   effort to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on portability;
   especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann,
   Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer...

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to the git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Members of the development community can sometimes be found on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list. If you have
patches, please send them to the list address (git@vger.kernel.org).
following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages there, and the convention is to Cc:
everybody involved, so you don't even have to say "Please Cc: me, I am
not subscribed".

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but
it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please do not
hesitate to send a reminder message politely in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have enough
mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often
helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a
reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant to
contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a list and
it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to keep some
helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's cooking"
messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the tip of the
"master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at
kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are found in the
"todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It is a demonstration
of how to use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may add more maintenance
branches (e.g. "maint-1.6.3") if we have hugely backward incompatible
feature updates in the future to keep an older release alive; I may not,
but the distributed nature of git means any volunteer can run a
stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  There could occasionally be
minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs but they are not expected to be
anything major, and more importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every
now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.7.3 done on Sep 18/19, 2010.  You can expect that the tip of
the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.2.3.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".  A new
development, either initiated by myself or more often by somebody who
found his or her own itch to scratch, does not usually happen on "master",
however.  Instead, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of
"master", and it first is tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups
at this point.  Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are
running ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the tip
of these branches in my public repository, however, partly to keep the
number of branches that downstream developers need to worry about low, and
primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is broken
in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then with some
more work (either by the original contributor's effort or help from other
people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can now be tested by
wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in the latter, better
shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter
category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip of "master".  It
might not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work
more or less without major breakage.  I usually use "next" version of git
for my own work, so it cannot be _that_ broken to prevent me from
integrating and pushing the changes out.  The "next" branch is where new
and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either (this automatically means the topics that have
been merged into "next" are usually not rebased, and you can find the tip
of topic branches you are interested in from the output of "git log
next"). You should be able to safely build on top of them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be
rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics.  The commit
that replaces the tip of the "next" will usually have the identical tree,
but it will have different ancestry from the tip of "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of topic
branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are only in "pu", are
subject to rebasing in general.  By the above definition of how "next"
works, you can tell that this branch will contain quite experimental and
obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it graduates
to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so good and
the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before
it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be expected to stay more
stable than any released version).  Similarly to the above, I do it with
this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release
(being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it is later found seriously
broken and reverted), nor even in any future release.  There even were
cases that topics needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating
to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre, Ren辿
   Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes Sixt,
   and Sverre Rabbelier on general implementation issues and reviews
   on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentation (and countless others for
   proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool (and Theodore
   Ts'o for creating it in the first place).

 - David Aguilar for git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort to
   move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason
   Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and
   countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Members of the development community can sometimes be found on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list If you have
patches, please send them to the list address (git@vger.kernel.org).
following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages there, and the convention is to Cc:
everybody involved, so you don't even have to say "Please Cc: me, I am
not subscribed".

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but
it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please do not
hesitate to send a reminder message politely in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have enough
mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often
helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a
reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant to
contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a list and
it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to keep some
helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's cooking"
messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the tip of the
"master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at
kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are found in the
"todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It is a demonstration
of how to use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may add more maintenance
branches (e.g. "maint-1.6.3") if we have hugely backward incompatible
feature updates in the future to keep an older release alive; I may not,
but the distributed nature of git means any volunteer can run a
stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  There could occasionally be
minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs but they are not expected to be
anything major, and more importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every
now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.7.2 done on Jul 21, 2010.  You can expect that the tip of
the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.7.1.1.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".  A new
development, either initiated by myself or more often by somebody who
found his or her own itch to scratch, does not usually happen on "master",
however.  Instead, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of
"master", and it first is tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups
at this point.  Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are
running ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the tip
of these branches in my public repository, however, partly to keep the
number of branches that downstream developers need to worry about low, and
primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is broken
in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then with some
more work (either by the original contributor's effort or help from other
people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can now be tested by
wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in the latter, better
shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter
category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip of "master".  It
might not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work
more or less without major breakage.  I usually use "next" version of git
for my own work, so it cannot be _that_ broken to prevent me from
integrating and pushing the changes out.  The "next" branch is where new
and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either (this automatically means the topics that have
been merged into "next" are usually not rebased, and you can find the tip
of topic branches you are interested in from the output of "git log
next"). You should be able to safely build on top of them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be
rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics.  The commit
that replaces the tip of the "next" will usually have the identical tree,
but it will have different ancestry from the tip of "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of topic
branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are only in "pu", are
subject to rebasing in general.  By the above definition of how "next"
works, you can tell that this branch will contain quite experimental and
obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it graduates
to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so good and
the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before
it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be expected to stay more
stable than any released version).  Similarly to the above, I do it with
this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release
(being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it is later found seriously
broken and reverted), nor even in any future release.  There even were
cases that topics needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating
to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre, Ren辿
   Scharfe, Jeff King, Jonathan Nieder, Johan Herland, Johannes Sixt,
   and Sverre Rabbelier on general implementation issues and reviews
   on the mailing list.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentation (and countless others for
   proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool (and Theodore
   Ts'o for creating it in the first place).

 - David Aguilar for git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort to
   move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason
   Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and
   countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Members of the development community can sometimes be found on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list If you have
patches, please send them to the list address (git@vger.kernel.org).
following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages there, and the convention is to Cc:
everybody involved, so you don't even have to say "Please Cc: me, I am
not subscribed".

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but
it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please do not
hesitate to send a reminder message politely in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have enough
mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often
helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a
reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant to
contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a list and
it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to keep some
helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's cooking"
messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the tip of the
"master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at
kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are found in the
"todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It is a demonstration
of how to use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may add more maintenance
branches (e.g. "maint-1.6.3") if we have hugely backward incompatible
feature updates in the future to keep an older release alive; I may not,
but the distributed nature of git means any volunteer can run a
stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  There could occasionally be
minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs but they are not expected to be
anything major, and more importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every
now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.7.0 done on Feb 12, 2010.  You can expect that the tip of
the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.6.6.2.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".  A new
development, either initiated by myself or more often by somebody who
found his or her own itch to scratch, does not usually happen on "master",
however.  Instead, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of
"master", and it first is tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups
at this point.  Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are
running ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the tip
of these branches in my public repository, however, partly to keep the
number of branches that downstream developers need to worry about low, and
primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is broken
in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then with some
more work (either by the original contributor's effort or help from other
people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can now be tested by
wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in the latter, better
shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter
category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip of "master".  It
might not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work
more or less without major breakage.  I usually use "next" version of git
for my own work, so it cannot be _that_ broken to prevent me from
integrating and pushing the changes out.  The "next" branch is where new
and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either (this automatically means the topics that have
been merged into "next" are usually not rebased, and you can find the tip
of topic branches you are interested in from the output of "git log
next"). You should be able to safely build on top of them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be
rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics.  The commit
that replaces the tip of the "next" will usually have the identical tree,
but it will have different ancestry from the tip of "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of topic
branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are only in "pu", are
subject to rebasing in general.  By the above definition of how "next"
works, you can tell that this branch will contain quite experimental and
obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it graduates
to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so good and
the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before
it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be expected to stay more
stable than any released version).  Similarly to the above, I do it with
this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release
(being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it is later found seriously
broken and reverted), nor even in any future release.  There even were
cases that topics needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating
to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre, Ren辿
   Scharfe, Jeff King and Johannes Sixt on general implementation
   issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentation (and countless others for
   proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool (and Theodore
   Ts'o for creating it in the first place).

 - David Aguilar for git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort to
   move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason
   Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and
   countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git development community.

This message is written by the maintainer and talks about how Git
project is managed, and how you can work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Members of the development community can sometimes be found on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development is primarily done on the Git mailing list If you have
patches, please send them to the list address (git@vger.kernel.org).
following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.  You don't have to be
subscribed to send messages there, and the convention is to Cc:
everybody involved, so you don't even have to say "Please Cc: me, I am
not subscribed".

If you sent a patch and you did not hear any response from anybody for
several days, it could be that your patch was totally uninteresting, but
it also is possible that it was simply lost in the noise.  Please do not
hesitate to send a reminder message politely in such a case.  Messages
getting lost in the noise is a sign that people involved don't have enough
mental/time bandwidth to process them right at the moment, and it often
helps to wait until the list traffic becomes calmer before sending such a
reminder.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant to
contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a list and
it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to keep some
helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's cooking"
messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the tip of the
"master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be visible at
kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are found in the
"todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It is a demonstration
of how to use a post-update hook to automate a task after pushing into a
repository.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the source tree
of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may add more maintenance
branches (e.g. "maint-1.6.3") if we have hugely backward incompatible
feature updates in the future to keep an older release alive; I may not,
but the distributed nature of git means any volunteer can run a
stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well tested and
ready to be used in a production setting.  There could occasionally be
minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs but they are not expected to be
anything major, and more importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every
now and then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The last such
release was 1.6.6 done on Dec 23rd 2009.  You can expect that the tip of
the "master" branch is always more stable than any of the released
versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off from
"master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes after a feature
release are applied to this branch and maintenance releases are cut from
it.  The maintenance releases are named with four dotted decimal, named
after the feature release they are updates to; the last such release was
1.6.5.7.  New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".  A new
development, either initiated by myself or more often by somebody who
found his or her own itch to scratch, does not usually happen on "master",
however.  Instead, a separate topic branch is forked from the tip of
"master", and it first is tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups
at this point.  Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are
running ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the tip
of these branches in my public repository, however, partly to keep the
number of branches that downstream developers need to worry about low, and
primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is broken
in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then with some
more work (either by the original contributor's effort or help from other
people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can now be tested by
wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in the latter, better
shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the latter
category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip of "master".  It
might not be quite rock-solid production ready, but is expected to work
more or less without major breakage.  I usually use "next" version of git
for my own work, so it cannot be _that_ broken to prevent me from
integrating and pushing the changes out.  The "next" branch is where new
and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and "next"
usually will not be either (this automatically means the topics that have
been merged into "next" are usually not rebased, and you can find the tip
of topic branches you are interested in from the output of "git log
next"). You should be able to safely build on top of them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next" will be
rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving topics.  The commit
that replaces the tip of the "next" will usually have the identical tree,
but it will have different ancestry from the tip of "master".

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of topic
branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are only in "pu", are
subject to rebasing in general.  By the above definition of how "next"
works, you can tell that this branch will contain quite experimental and
obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it graduates
to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so good and
the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be polished to perfection before
it is merged to "master" (that's why "master" can be expected to stay more
stable than any released version).  Similarly to the above, I do it with
this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the next release
(being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it is later found seriously
broken and reverted), nor even in any future release.  There even were
cases that topics needed reverting a few commits in them before graduating
to "master", or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed changes
should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate fixes
and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they have their
own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the current
shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list regulars whose help
I have relied on and expect to continue relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre, Ren辿
   Scharfe, Jeff King and Johannes Sixt on general implementation
   issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta on
   gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentation (and countless others for
   proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool (and Theodore
   Ts'o for creating it in the first place).

 - David Aguilar for git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort to
   move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o, Jason
   Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, Brandon Casey, Jeff King, Alex Riesen and
   countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant
to contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a
list and it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to
keep some helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's
in/cooking" messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use a post-update hook to
automate a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.6.3") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.6.4 done on Jul 29th 2009.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.6.3.4.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
usually have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), nor even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed
changes should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would
delegate fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary
contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   Ren辿 Scharfe, Jeff King and Johannes Sixt on general
   implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta
   on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentation (and countless others for
   proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool (and Theodore
   Ts'o for creating it in the first place).

 - David Aguilar for git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, Brandon Casey, Jeff King,
   Alex Riesen and countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Baz <brian.ewins@gmail.com> writes:

> Junio, Rene Scharfe's name appears incorrectly in the MaintNotes
> message - the mail was sent as iso-2022-jp. Previous editions of this
> mail (like the one on 4th March) were in utf-8. Maybe a consequence of
> the recent change you made to your emacs setup?

Thanks for not just complaining but giving me a clue where to look into.
I very much appreciate it.  Will find time to look into it before sending
any more message with a non-ascii character.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Baz]

Apologies for not quoting the mail I'm replying to, but gmail would
just make the character encoding issues worse.

Junio, Rene Scharfe's name appears incorrectly in the MaintNotes
message - the mail was sent as iso-2022-jp. Previous editions of this
mail (like the one on 4th March) were in utf-8. Maybe a consequence of
the recent change you made to your emacs setup?

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/115746

Just mentioning it in case it causes problems with patch mails down the line.

Cheers,
Baz

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant
to contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a
list and it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to
keep some helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's
in/cooking" messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use a post-update hook to
automate a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.4") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.6.3 done on May 6th 2009.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.6.2.5.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
usually have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), nor even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed
changes should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would
delegate fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary
contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   Ren辿 Scharfe, Jeff King and Johannes Sixt on general
   implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta
   on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentation (and countless others for
   proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - Charles Bailey for taking good care of git-mergetool (and Theodore
   Ts'o for creating it in the first place).

 - David Aguilar for git-difftool.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, Brandon Casey, Jeff King,
   Alex Riesen and countless others.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not about the
source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The first one was meant
to contain TODO list for me, but I am not good at maintaining such a
list and it is in an abandoned state.  The branch mostly is used to
keep some helper scripts I use to maintain git and the regular "What's
in/cooking" messages these days.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use a post-update hook to
automate a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.4") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.6.2 done on Mar 3rd 2009.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.6.1.3.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
usually have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), nor even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines to whom your proposed
changes should be sent.  As described in contrib/README, I would
delegate fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to the primary
contributors of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe, Jeff King and Johannes Sixt on general
   implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, Luben Tuikov, Giuseppe Bilotta
   on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentation (and countless others for
   proofreading and fixing).

 - Alexandre Julliard on Emacs integration.

 - Charles Bailey for git-mergetool (and Theodore Ts'o for creating
   the tool).

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, Brandon Casey, but countless
   others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list and it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.4") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.6.1 done on Dec 24th 2008.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.6.0.6.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.  Most of the fruits
   from their porting efforts have been merged to the mainline git.git
   repository in 1.6.0 release.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

I also keep a copy of it at http://members.cox.net/junkio/

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list and it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.4") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.6.0 done on Aug 17th 2008.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.5.6.5.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.  Most of the fruits
   from their porting efforts have been merged to the mainline git.git
   repository in 1.6.0 release.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list and it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.4") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.5.6 done on Jun 18th this year.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.5.6.3.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.  Most of the fruits
   from their porting efforts have been merged to the mainline git.git
   repository in 1.6.0 release.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list and it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.4") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.5.6 done on Jun 18th this year.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.5.5.4.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.  Although my
   repository does not have much from the effort of MinGW team,
   I expect a merge into mainline will happen so that everybody
   can work from the same codebase.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list and it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.4") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.5.5 done on Apr 7th this year.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.5.4.5.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.  Although my
   repository does not have much from the effort of MinGW team,
   I expect a merge into mainline will happen so that everybody
   can work from the same codebase.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list and it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.3") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.5.4 done on Feb 2nd this year.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.5.4.4.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.  Although my
   repository does not have much from the effort of MinGW team,
   I expect a merge into mainline will happen so that everybody
   can work from the same codebase.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Welcome to git community.

This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can work
with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on the git mailing list
(git@vger.kernel.org).  If you have patches, please send them to the
list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list and it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.3") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that herself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was 1.5.4 done on Feb 2nd this year.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was 1.5.4.2.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

The quality of topic branches are judged primarily by the mailing list
discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea but obviously is
broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing testsuite)" and then
with some more work (either by the original contributor's effort or
help from other people on the list) becomes "more or less done and can
now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily, most of them start out in
the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The two branches "master" and "maint" are never rewound, and
"next" usually will not be either (this automatically means the
topics that have been merged into "next" are usually not
rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you are
interested in from the output of "git log next"). You should be
able to safely track them.

After a feature release is made from "master", however, "next"
will be rebuilt from the tip of "master" using the surviving
topics.  The commit that replaces the tip of the "next" will
have the identical tree, but it will have different ancestry
from the tip of "master".  An announcement will be made to warn
people about such a rebasing.

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 - git-gui/ comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui project:

        git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 - gitk-git/ comes from Paul Mackerras's gitk project:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   René Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Simon Hausmann on git-p4.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt and others for their effort
   to move things forward on the Windows front.  Although my
   repository does not have much from the effort of MinGW team,
   I expect a merge into mainline will happen so that everybody
   can work from the same codebase.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Jakub Narebski]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Now a new feature release is out, it's a good time to welcome new
> people to the list.  This message talks about how git.git is managed,
> and how you can work with it.

> There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
> source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".

Actually there are five: you didn't mention "offcuts" branch,
nor wrote what this branch is about (for example how it differs
from "pu").

>  gitk     -- this file is maintained by Paul Mackerras, at:
> 
>              git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

It is gitk-git/ subdirectory now (why not simply gitk/ ?).

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Now a new feature release is out, it's a good time to welcome new
people to the list.  This message talks about how git.git is managed,
and how you can work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on this mailing list
you are reading right now.  If you have patches, please send
them to the list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list so it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.1") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that himself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was v1.5.4 done on Feb 2nd this year.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was v1.5.3.8.
New features never go to this branch.  This branch is also
merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

I judge the quality of topic branches, taking advices from the
mailing list discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea
but obviously is broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing
testsuite)" and then with some more work (either by the original
contributor or help from other people on the list) becomes "more
or less done and can now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily,
most of them start out in the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The above three branches, "master", "maint" and "next" are never
rewound, so you should be able to safely track them (this
automatically means the topics that have been merged into "next"
are never rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you
are interested in from the output of "git log next").

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 git-gui/ -- this subdirectory comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui
             project, which is found at:

             git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 gitk     -- this file is maintained by Paul Mackerras, at:

             git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   Réne Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin and Johannes Sixt for their effort to
   move things forward on the Windows front.  Although my
   repository does not have much from the effort of MinGW team,
   I expect a merge into mainline will happen so that everybody
   can work from the same codebase.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>
>> * IRC and Mailing list
>  
>> When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
>> gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:
>> 
>>         http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217
>> 
>> as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
>> gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.
>
> Isn't it better to give Message-ID (perhaps with addition to
> some archive URLs)?

Then please do so.  I have no problem with that.

But I am talking about practices of people who give pointer to
list archives as URL in this section, and I am just sick and
tired of seeing references to marc.info that does not give you
useful threaded interface.

> What about "offcuts" branch?

What about it?  It is not that relevant to people new to the
community.

Re: A note from the maintainer

[Jakub Narebski]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> * IRC and Mailing list
 
> When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
> gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:
> 
>         http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217
> 
> as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
> gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

Isn't it better to give Message-ID (perhaps with addition to
some archive URLs)? This way one can search his/her own mail
archive; also (I think) all git mail archives support finding
article with given Message-ID (e.g. http://mid.gmane.org/<msg-id>
for GMane).
 
> * Repositories, branches and documentation.

> There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
> source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
> add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.3") if we have
> hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
> an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
> git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that himself.

What about "offcuts" branch?

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Now a new maitenance release is out and we are reasonably in a
good shape to expect smooth progress toward the next feature
release, it's a good time to welcome new people to the list.
This message talks about how git.git is managed, and how you can
work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on this mailing list
you are reading right now.  If you have patches, please send
them to the list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about an
obscure corner that I do not personally use.  But I am obviously not
perfect.  If you sent a patch that you did not hear from anybody for
three days, that is a very good indication that it was dropped on the
floor --- please do not hesitate to remind me.

The list archive is available at a few public sites as well:

        http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/
        http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git
        http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/

and some people seem to prefer to read it over NNTP:

        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git

When you point at a message in a mailing list archive, using
gmane is often the easiest to follow by readers, like this:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/27/focus=217

as it also allows people who subscribe to the mailing list as
gmane newsgroup to "jump to" the article.

* Repositories, branches and documentation.

My public git.git repository is at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/

Immediately after I publish to the primary repository at kernel.org, I
also push into an alternate here:

        git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git/

Impatient people might have better luck with the latter one.

Their gitweb interfaces are found at:

        http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git
        http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git

There are three branches in git.git repository that are not
about the source tree of git: "todo", "html" and "man".  The
first one was meant to contain TODO list for me, but I am not
good at maintaining such a list so it is not as often updated as
it could/should be.  It also contains some helper scripts I use
to maintain git.

The "html" and "man" are autogenerated documentation from the
tip of the "master" branch; the tip of "html" is extracted to be
visible at kernel.org at:

        http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

The above URL is the top-level documentation page, and it has
links to documentation of older releases.

The script to maintain these two documentation branches are
found in "todo" branch as dodoc.sh, if you are interested.  It
is a good demonstration of how to use an update hook to automate
a task.

There are four branches in git.git repository that track the
source tree of git: "master", "maint", "next", and "pu".  I may
add more maintenance branches (e.g. "maint-1.5.3") if we have
hugely backward incompatible feature updates in the future to keep
an older release alive; I may not, but the distributed nature of
git means any volunteer can run a stable-tree like that himself.

The "master" branch is meant to contain what are very well
tested and ready to be used in a production setting.  There
could occasionally be minor breakages or brown paper bag bugs
but they are not expected to be anything major, and more
importantly quickly and trivially fixable.  Every now and
then, a "feature release" is cut from the tip of this branch and
they typically are named with three dotted decimal digits.  The
last such release was v1.5.3 done on Sep 2nd last year.  You
can expect that the tip of the "master" branch is always more
stable than any of the released versions.

Whenever a feature release is made, "maint" branch is forked off
from "master" at that point.  Obvious, safe and urgent fixes
after a feature release are applied to this branch and
maintenance releases are cut from it.  The maintenance releases
are named with four dotted decimal, named after the feature
release they are updates to; the last such release was v1.5.3.8,
made tonight.  New features never go to this branch.  This
branch is also merged into "master" to propagate the fixes forward.

A trivial and safe enhancement goes directly on top of "master".
A new development, either initiated by myself or more often by
somebody who found his or her own itch to scratch, does not
usually happen on "master", however.  Instead, a separate topic
branch is forked from the tip of "master", and it first is
tested in isolation; I may make minimum fixups at this point.
Usually there are a handful such topic branches that are running
ahead of "master" in git.git repository.  I do not publish the
tip of these branches in my public repository, however, partly
to keep the number of branches that downstream developers need
to worry about low, and primarily because I am lazy.

I judge the quality of topic branches, taking advices from the
mailing list discussions.  Some of them start out as "good idea
but obviously is broken in some areas (e.g. breaks the existing
testsuite)" and then with some more work (either by the original
contributor or help from other people on the list) becomes "more
or less done and can now be tested by wider audience".  Luckily,
most of them start out in the latter, better shape.

The "next" branch is to merge and test topic branches in the
latter category.  In general, the branch always contains the tip
of "master".  It might not be quite rock-solid production ready,
but is expected to work more or less without major breakage.  I
usually use "next" version of git for my own work, so it cannot
be _that_ broken to prevent me from pushing the changes out.
The "next" branch is where new and exciting things take place.

The above three branches, "master", "maint" and "next" are never
rewound, so you should be able to safely track them (this
automatically means the topics that have been merged into "next"
are never rebased, and you can find the tip of topic branches you
are interested in from the output of "git log next").

The "pu" (proposed updates) branch bundles all the remainder of
topic branches.  The "pu" branch, and topic branches that are
only in "pu", are subject to rebasing in general.  By the above
definition of how "next" works, you can tell that this branch
will contain quite experimental and obviously broken stuff.

When a topic that was in "pu" proves to be in testable shape, it
graduates to "next".  I do this with:

        git checkout next
        git merge that-topic-branch

Sometimes, an idea that looked promising turns out to be not so
good and the topic can be dropped from "pu" in such a case.

A topic that is in "next" is expected to be tweaked and fixed to
perfection before it is merged to "master" (that's why "master"
can be expected to stay very stable).  Similarly to the above, I
do it with this:

        git checkout master
        git merge that-topic-branch
        git branch -d that-topic-branch

Note that being in "next" is not a guarantee to appear in the
next release (being in "master" is such a guarantee, unless it
is later found seriously broken and reverted), or even in any
future release.  There even were cases that topics needed
reverting a few commits in them before graduating to "master",
or a topic that already was in "next" were entirely reverted
from "next" because fatal flaws were found in them later.

Starting from v1.5.0, "master" and "maint" have release notes
for the next release in Documentation/RelNotes-* files, so that
I do not have to run around summarizing what happened just
before the release.


* Other people's trees, trusted lieutenants and credits.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches outlines who your changes should
be sent to.  As described in contrib/README, I would delegate
fixes and enhancements in contrib/ area to primary contributors
of them.

Although the following are included in git.git repository, they
have their own authoritative repository and maintainers:

 git-gui/ -- this subdirectory comes from Shawn Pearce's git-gui
             project, which is found at:

             git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git

 gitk     -- this file is maintained by Paul Mackerras, at:

             git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk.git

I would like to thank everybody who helped to raise git into the
current shape.  Especially I would like to thank the git list
regulars whose help I have relied on and expect to continue
relying on heavily:

 - Linus on general design issues.

 - Linus, Shawn Pearce, Johannes Schindelin, Nicolas Pitre,
   Réne Scharfe and Jeff King on general implementation issues.

 - Shawn and Nicolas Pitre on pack issues.

 - Martin Langhoff and Frank Lichtenheld on cvsserver and cvsimport.

 - Paul Mackerras on gitk.

 - Eric Wong on git-svn.

 - Jakub Narebski, Petr Baudis, and Luben Tuikov on gitweb.

 - J. Bruce Fields on documentaton issues.

 - Johannes Schindelin and Johannes Sixt for their effort to
   move things forward on the Windows front.  Although my
   repository does not have much from the effort of MinGW team,
   I expect a merge into mainline will happen so that everybody
   can work from the same codebase.

 - People on non-Linux platforms for keeping their eyes on
   portability; especially, Randal Schwartz, Theodore Ts'o,
   Jason Riedy, Thomas Glanzmann, but countless others as well.

* This document

The latest copy of this document is found in git.git repository,
on 'todo' branch, as MaintNotes.

A note from the maintainer

[Junio C Hamano]

Now a new feature release is out, it's a good time to welcome new
people to the list.  This message talks about how git.git is managed,
and how you can work with it.

* IRC and Mailing list

Many active members of development community hang around on #git
IRC channel on Freenode.  Its log is available at:

        http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/git

The development however is primarily done on this mailing list
you are reading right now.  If you have patches, please send
them to the list, following Documentation/SubmittingPatches.

I usually try to read all patches posted to the list, and follow
almost all the discussions on the list, unless the topic is about a