We currently have a development workflow that is based on parallel releases: one stream for patches on the latest stable release (the master branch), and one stream for new features and improvement for the next minor release (develop).
This setup is more complicated than having a single main branch, but it was introduced because at the time, doing minor/major releases was so much more difficult due to the release review process, that it made sense to make doing regular patch releases as simple as possible.
Given that doing minor releases has now become easier, it might make sense to switch back to a single long-term branch (master), making regular minor releases our default release schedule. When we need a patch release, we can plan it on an ad-hoc basis, by creating a temporary release branch for it, and cherry-picking the fixes we want in there from the master branch. It's a little more work to prep a patch release this way, but since we're now consistently using squash-merge, cherry-picking should in most cases be very simple.
Advantages:
1. less hassle keeping things in sync (no need for automated merge scripts, fewer CI jobs to maintain)
2. less confusion for third party contributors on which branch to work from and/or merge to
3. less complicated release management process / release scripts
4. less juggling of minor vs patch release planning.
Disadvantages:
1. some disruption to current established workflow
2. doing patch releases becomes slightly harder (cherry-picking)
Any thoughts on whether making this change is worth it? If we go ahead with this, I'd say directly after the 3.3.0 release is the best point to do it.
Jeen
PS on a semi-related note I have been giving some thought to renaming our master branch to 'main' - I don't really want to get into a political/philosophical debate whether or not 'master' as a term is bad in the context of git branches, but it seems an easy enough change to make, and if it removes a minor speed bump for someone else to become involved with the project I see no reason not to make that change. See also
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx 