# SaltStack Git Policy

The SaltStack team follows a git policy to maintain stability and consistency with the repository.

The git policy has been developed to encourage contributions and make contributing to Salt as easy as possible. Code contributors to SaltStack projects DO NOT NEED TO READ THIS DOCUMENT, because all contributions come into SaltStack via a single gateway to make it as easy as possible for contributors to give us code.

The primary rule of git management in SaltStack is to make life easy on contributors and developers to send in code. Simplicity is always a goal!

## New Code Entry

All new SaltStack code should be submitted against `master`.

## Release Branching

SaltStack maintains two types of releases, `Feature Releases` and `Point Releases` (also commonly referred to as `Bugfix Releases`. A feature release is managed by incrementing the first or second release point number, so 2015.5.5 -> 2015.8.0 signifies a feature release and 2015.8.0 -> 2015.8.1 signifies a point release.

### Feature Release Branching

Each feature release is maintained in a dedicated git branch derived from the last applicable release commit on develop. All file changes relevant to the feature release will be completed in the `master` branch prior to the creation of the feature release branch. The feature release branch will be named after the relevant numbers to the feature release, which constitute the first two numbers. This means that the release branch for the 2015.8.0 series is named 2015.8.

A feature release branch is created with the following command:

    # git checkout -b 2015.8 # From the master branch
    # git push origin 2015.8

### Point Releases

As documented in SEP 14, point releases should be rare.