How to handle doc changes for not yet released features about apm-agent-nodejs HOT 5 CLOSED

cc @elastic/apm

from apm-agent-nodejs.

What I would expect:

• Everything merged into master will show up in the master docs. The "master" branch is not the one that is installed through npm install elastic-apm-node. More something like npm install --branch=master elastic-apm-node (or what option exists there in npm ...).
• npm install elastic-apm-node installs the most recent release tag. I assume there is an option in npm that a version can be specified.

The above I think would resemble what the rest of the stack does.

from apm-agent-nodejs.

@ruflin npm doesn't install directly from github by default (it's possible, but normally not recommended). Instead packages are downloaded from the central npm registry as tar-balls. They are uploaded by the developer once the developer cut a release. So a release is basically the developer making a new commit which bumps the version number and then uploads a tar-ball to the the registry containing whatever files was in his local directory at the time the tar-ball was created.

As a developer I can make this release commit in any branch. Most projects do this in the master branch. But if a project needs to support making patch releases for older releases, they tend to have branches for each major release in which the developer will make and push these release commits that bumps the version. But this is usually just there to benefit the developer. The user of the module will still just install it from the npm registry as any other version without knowing anything about, nor specifying a git branch, commit, or tag.

(In case you're interested, to install from master - or any other git ref for that matter - you'd write npm install <github-user>/<repo>[#<ref>])

TL;DR:

My point is that we're free to choose a branch strategy without considering how people are installing the module. Instead I think we should optimize of how easy it is to us manage and work with every day, as long as it lives up to our minimum requirements: E.g. can we display the docs how we want + does it allow us to make the releases that we need.

from apm-agent-nodejs.

A single branch rather than a branch per major is probably enough for now. I wouldn't expect us to need to do a lot of backporting. We can always reevaluate that in the future.

from apm-agent-nodejs.

We since decided to have branches for each major version. That solves this issue, so I'll close for now

from apm-agent-nodejs.