from the readme:
We have a release process that goes through several stages before it reaches master. This allows the most conservative users just use the master branch, which is only updated after the other branches have signed off on a release.
99% of the activity is in the dev branch, this is where I am testing each change one by one and there are literally thousands of updates. Only use this branch if you really want to be on the bleeding edge. I try to keep things stable, but there are times where necessarily there are bugs in the dev branch, since I am actively developing and debugging here. A good rule is to wait for at least 4 hours from the last update before using the dev branch (unless you know what you are doing)
After things look good in the dev branch, it is propagated to the beta branch, this is the version the notary nodes use. They are knowledegable command line server guys and so they have a keen eye for anything that wasnt caught during the dev cycle.
After the notary nodes verify things are working and the latest release is deemed stable, it is propagated to the dPoW branch. From here an automated Jenkins process builds it for all OS, and since the notary nodes are all unix, it is possible for some issues to be caught at this stage. The dPoW branch is what goes into the GUI installers.
After the GUI are updated and released and it is verified that no significant support issues were created, the master branch is finally updated.
Master branch: exchanges and users that build from the repo without changing branches
dPoW branch: autobuild into GUI installers, unix, osx, windows
beta branch: notary nodes, command line unix
dev branch: bleeding edge, possibly wont even compile, multiple updates per hour
Thanks for detailed explanation.
Can you make tag and release binaries time to time? So that we can communicate with version number if there's some bug in it.
I mostly think that official stable version should be released.
Current latest release date was on 9 Sep, 2016. I think it's too old.
master branch was updated 23 days ago, I dont think that it's too old (just updated to fix build issue)
dPoW branch was updated 4 days ago
beta branch was updated 4 days ago
dev branch was updated 12 hours ago
each git commit has a hash, you can always report a bug against a specific commit hash.
exactly what bug do you want to report? Or is it a theoretical need to be able to refer to some version number in case you find a bug? If so, just use the github hash, why to spend time to manually tag things when git does it automatically?
The release process above is made so you can pull from master and get a stable release. Is it not stable? Did you find a bug in master branch?