GitFlow Groundhog Day

Yes, this is all over again the old discussion about what’s the best branching model for projects using Git as their version control system. I know, there are countless blog posts (e. g. 1, 2, or 3) about that topic out there… yet, I feel most of the discussion is focused on projects with continuous deployment (i. e. mostly web applications), whereas classical desktop software with classical release cycles are rather underrepresented.

First, some thoughts on what I actually need, before creating any new ideas others put already in the bin due to being unfit… When hacking on a desktop software or an operating system (i. e. something that will be deployed on many systems, by many people, without me as developer being aware), it all comes down to releases. People are used to releases, updates etc. being clearly labelled with a semantic version designator. This is no different from what you should do for SAAS web applications — what’s really different here is that for desktop applications, several supported versions can exist in parallel. So for me, a good branching model should