When Backdrop was released a little over a month ago, we decided to concentrate our resources on stabilization. We've hammered out those inevitable first-release bugs, and we have a steady-stream of pull-requests coming in against Backdrop for the 1.1.0 version. It's now time to branch the project to separate the new features from the bug fixes. Since this is the first branch we've created in the Backdrop project, it's a good time to recap how we're handling branch management.
Tonight we created the 1.0.x branch. The current 1.x branch was also left in place. These two branches are used for the following purposes:
- 1.0.x: Bug fixes only.
- 1.x: All bug fixes and API-compatible features.
Eventually we'll create a 2.x branch for API-breaking changes, but ideally we will work to add all features to the 1.x branch and the 2.x branch is simply used to remove the backwards-compatibility shims. It's not clear how well that approach will work with software as large and comprehensive as Backdrop, but that's the goal.
Backdrop aims to be a current version first platform, where bug fixes are fixed in the current version and then ported forward to the next version. This means that all pull requests that fix bugs should be against 1.0.x (the current version). Then these changes will be continuously merged into the 1.x branch, so as to be included in 1.1.0.
For more information about Backdrop's release cycle see https://backdropcms.org/releases. You might also be interested in seeing the target goals for next release of Backdrop, which include WYSIWYG, Token, Pathauto, and an admin theme refresh.
Thanks to our small-but-amazing(!) Backdrop community who are helping each other realize a vision of a focused, faster, and backwards-compatible CMS.