Strategy to merge the code to main branch

Merging to main branch from staging

Here we detail what is the strategy to merge code to main branch from our development branch, staging:

• Each small piece of work is called a milestone, which can be composed by one or several PRs. An example of a milestone is a new algorithm or a new utility function.
• When a milestone is finished, which should include having tests and updating the documentation, we do a PR to main.
• After a group of milestones are finished, we consider to do a release. The releases are tracked and planned on this board.

Creating a Release

The release is a stable version of the codes in the repository.

The process of creating a release in the Recommenders repository has the following steps:

1. Change the version number - this can be found in reco_utils/__init__.py.
2. Create a tag. A tag is just an annotated pointer to a commit. For creating a tag we can do:

git tag -a 2019.02 -m "Recommenders version 2019.02: 6 new algos, new utilities, bug fixes and more"
git push origin 2019.02

3. Create a release. A release is how GitHub shows tags to users. In other words, it is the way to ship a stable version to our users. To create a release:

• In the Recommenders repo, go to releases.
• Click on Draft a new release.
• Select the tag you just created.
• Type a title and description that describes your release.
• Press publish release

4. Create a new branch with the name of the version and push it to the repo. This is going to be a stale branch.