Branch management

Guide

• New development occurs on the main branch.
• The main branch should always have a green build!
• Backwards-compatible bug fixes should target the main branch and subsequently be ported to stable branches.
• Once the main branch is ready for release, it will be tagged and become the new stable branch.

The etcd team has adopted a rolling release model and supports two stable versions of etcd.

Main branch

The main branch is our development branch. All new features land here first.

To try new and experimental features, pull main and play with it. Note that main may not be stable because new features may introduce bugs.

Before the release of the next stable version, feature PRs will be frozen. A release manager will be assigned to the major/minor version and will lead the etcd community in testing, bug-fix, and documentation of the release for one to two weeks.

Stable branches

All branches with the prefix release- are considered stable branches.

After every minor release (semver.org), we will have a new stable branch for that release, managed by a patch release manager. We will keep fixing the backward-compatible bugs for the latest two stable releases. A patch release to each supported release branch, incorporating any bug fixes, will be once every two weeks, given any patches.