Unclear for contributors which branch to contribute to

[fpgmaas]

There is both a dev, master and a release-1.3.0 branch. master seems outdated, dev is the default, but release-1.3.0 has some changes that are not on dev.

[rayluo]

Good question.

1. As a rule of thumb, it is always best to contribute to a repository's default branch, regardless of what name it uses. In this case, it is dev.
2. It is also possible to - and we can't stop you from - creating PR towards non-default branch. Occasionally, there might be a legit intention to do so, for example, "I really think you should add this last-minute change into your in-progress PR whose feature branch is foo or release-x.y.z". If you do, please at least call this out in your PR's description; or preferably discuss with us first via a github issue and/or a comment in our existing PR.
3. Lastly, the master branch was originally intended to be an archive of all the previously releases. But I/we realized that it only works well for linear releases with incremental changes; it does not work quite well when/if we have experimental long-lived beta releases which diverge from the stable releases. So, nowadays we just tag each release and no longer merge them back to master.
   We may consider sync master to dev and then make master the new default branch, and remove dev, so that 1 and 3 can converge, and you will have one less branch to get confused with. :-)

[fpgmaas]

Sorry for the brief issue description and thanks for the elaborate response! I agree that usually the default branch is appropriate to make PR's towards :) I guess this morning specifically I was a bit confused given that the release-1.3.0 and the dev branch were out of sync, while 1.3.0 was already released.

I think your proposal under 3 makes sense! For contributors not familiar with the project merging to master feels intuitive. Or, while we're at it, maybe rename it to main to be up-to-date with the modern convention.

No strong preference from my side, feel free to close this issue!

[rayluo]

Keeping this issue open, for now. We will revisit #3 after we take care of the current PRs.

[rayluo]

This repo's default branch is now switched to main.