Changes to OpenUSD GitHub Repository

Hi everyone,

I wanted to announce some changes to how we manage the OpenUSD repository on GitHub. These changes will be rolled out next week. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you!

  • Sunya

Changing default branch to “dev”

We are changing the default branch on GitHub from “release” to “dev”. This setting controls things like which branch is checked out when cloning the repo and which branch is selected by default as the base branch for pull requests.

Changing the default branch to dev fixes a number of issues:

  • Developers who clone the repo and start making changes will now be working on top of the latest changes in the dev branch by default.

  • The dev branch will be the default base branch for all pull requests, which is in line with our PR guidelines.

  • GitHub issues will automatically be closed as soon as the fixing commit lands in the dev branch instead of waiting for that commit to be merged into release, which may occur much later. This gives users a clearer view of the issues that are actually present and those that have already been addressed.

Manually merging pull requests

We will begin manually committing pull requests to the repo instead of merging them. The original author of the PR will be credited as the author of the commit. This is stolen from^H^H^H inspired by libcurl’s approach to handling pull requests and addresses the same issues:

  • Commits for pull requests will now include better commit messages. Previously, merge commits did not provide any information and required users to read the original PR (and subsequent discussions) to understand the contents of the change.

  • Changes to pull requests that are made internally before commit will no longer show up as “evil merges” in the repo. We can also provide more information about those changes in the expanded commit messages.

Beyond that, this change simplifies our internal workflow for processing PRs, which will hopefully lead to more frequent updates to the dev branch.

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