develop branch

[xylar]

I went ahead and created a develop branch and made it the default for this repo. However, this deserves discussion and buy-in from everyone involved in this repo. This issue page is meant to allow us to discuss any cons and to make sure everyone knows what changes were made and why.

[xylar]

The develop branch has been created to allow us to merge development without affecting the PreAndPostProcessingScripts repo. The idea is that changes are only merged to master after they have been confirmed to do no harm in ACME.

[xylar]

@pwolfram raised concerns in #29 (comment) that this decision was made unilaterally without time for group discussion. I definitely understand the concerns. As I have said in #29, I felt that 1) the changes could easily be undone if desired and 2) a merge to master that broke ACME could not be undone quite as easily. So I decided to go ahead and add a develop branch.

So let's have a retroactive discussion about whether we think that was a good plan, and also about what best practices should be for such changes in the future.

[pwolfram]

@xylar, I agree with you that this is the right decision. Thanks for the forward thinking that will probably save us a fair amount of the time in the future. My comment was mainly regarding the culture we are building and I really appreciate you opening this issue because I just want to make sure that we haven't missed a key viewpoint that another person may raise.

Full disclaimer: I just realized I merged #29 into develop prematurely but am happy to merge the code into the correct location if we decide against develop. Building personal habits toward the proper culture is a work in progress for me too.

@milenaveneziani and @vanroekel, do you see any problems with using a develop branch to better buffer the code against spurious merges and help coordinate merging to ACME?

If not I recommend we continue from this point forward using develop and close this issue.

[vanroekel]

I think a develop branch is the right idea. If I understand correctly with develop we wouldn't inadvertently break the acme portion of the analysis. And develop could be used for testing integration of new testing into acme. Seems like a really great idea to continue with develop.

[pwolfram]

Since no one has raised objections the plan is to use the develop branch and close this issue. Please reopen if you disagree.