CONTRIBUTING.md

Git workflow guidelines

• Never work on the master branch. Create a feature branch, work there, then merge into master.
• Try to keep feature braches short-lived, or at least keep them up to date with master. This can save you a lot of headaches when merging into master.
• When merging feature branches:
  1. Announce what you're doing on the Slack channel. This is to avoid race conditions where multiple people are attempting to rebase and merge at the same time.
  2. Pull changes to the master branch from the central repository.
  3. Clean up your feature branch and update it with changes from master. Two ways of doing this:
     • Rebasing feature onto master: git checkout feature && git rebase -i master (give this article a read if you're unfamiliar with the golden rule of rebasing!).
     • Merging master into feature: git checkout feature && git merge master. This has the upside of being safer if you're unsure about rebasing, but creates a messier history.
  4. Check the resulting codebase to make sure nothing is broken.
  5. Merge feature into master; at this point it should be a simple fast-forward commit with no conflicts to resolve: git checkout master && git merge feature.