Yocto Project Branch Conventions

Branching Conventions

Introduction

This page explains when we branch certain Yocto Project repositories, the naming conventions used and what we require from third party BSP maintainers if their BSPs are built via the Yocto Autobuilder

Branching Philosophy

We try to limit the number of branches in the main Yocto Project repository to feature branches, master, master-next and release branches. At one point in the past, we regularly utilized branches for milestones. In general, we no longer do so, however, we can and will utilize milestone branches when we're trying to maintain the stability of master, but get a very large feature into a milestone.

Naming Conventions

We utilize for the poky, eclipse-plugin-*, meta-qt3 repos the following convention

1. If it is a milestone branch, which should be rare, the branch name will be M.m_M<milestone_number>. Example: 1.5_M1 2. If it is a release branch, the branch name will be the name of the release (dylan, dora, etc) 3. If it is a next branch, the branch name will be the name of what it is the next of, appended with a -next (master-next, dora-next)

BSP repo maintainers

At one point in the past, we required BSP repo maintainers to maintain their repos utilizing our naming convention if they were utilizing the autobuilder infrastructure to maintain their builds. We no longer require this. However, BSP repo maintainers, should take note that it is their job to inform Build and Release of what branches/tags they wish to have included in a milestone/release build. It is also their job to make sure that the release branches are kept up to date.