Now that we've concluded our migration to git, we also made some changes to our branch naming scheme.

In the Mercurial age, we had two main branches:

development: the active development branch, used by developers to derive their feature branches from and which was used as the target branch for pull requests.
default: the branch that nightly release builds and official releases were built from. This branch was updated by merging development into default by Jenkins jobs that performed a wide range of automatic tests against the development branch. Only if these tests had passed, an automatic merge to the default was performed.

During the conversion from Mercurial to git, the default branch was automatically renamed to master, which is the canonical name for the "main" repository branch in git. For most open source projects, the master branch resembles the current line of development, similar to how we used the development branch in Mercurial.

To avoid confusion, we've now adapted the roles of our git branches in the upstream repository as follows:

master is our latest development version. It's the reference branch for developers wanting to work on new features or fixing bugs. Pull requests should be submitted against this branch.
stable is the branch that is used for nightly builds and official stable releases of the latest version (2.0 at the time of writing). New changes only get merged from the master branch if all test pass.

In addition to these two branches, we currently have one additional release branch in the upstream repository called branding-ses4. This branch contains the product-specific changes to openATTIC 2.0 as it's used in SUSE Enterprise Storage Version 4, which relate primarily to UI adaptions (branding and layout changes). This branch is synced with the stable branch every time a new stable release has been cut.

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