TerraLib Developer's Guide - Branches and Tags

You can check all branches available (remotes and local) and see the current one (marked with “*”):

$ git branch -a

The output of above command will be something like:

* master
  release-5.4
  release-5.3
  release-5.2
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/develop
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/release-5.0
  remotes/origin/release-5.0.0-alpha
  remotes/origin/release-5.0.0-beta
  remotes/origin/release-5.1
  remotes/origin/release-5.2
  remotes/upstream/develop
  remotes/upstream/master
  remotes/upstream/release-5.0
  remotes/upstream/release-5.0.0-alpha
  remotes/upstream/release-5.0.0-beta
  remotes/upstream/release-5.1
  remotes/upstream/release-5.2

In the above output the “* master” means that the current branch is master.

We have the following branches:

• develop: This is the branch where the development team is working to add new features to future versions of TerraLib and TerraView. It may be unstable although all updates¹⁾ are accepted only after building in all platform. We don't recommend to generate production versions of TerraLib/TerraView from this branch. Use it for testing new features and get involved with TerraLib/TerraView development.

• release-5.4: This is the branch for TerraLib generation 5.4.z.

• release-5.3: This is the branch for TerraLib generation 5.3.z.

• release-5.2: This is the branch for TerraLib generation 5.2.z.

• release-5.1: This is the branch for TerraLib generation 5.1.z.

• release-5.0: This is the branch for TerraLib generation 5.0.z.

• master: This is the default branch²⁾.

In order to switch to one of the branches listed above, use the checkout command and create a local branch to track the remote branch. The syntax of git checkout is:

$ git checkout -b <local_branch_name> <remote_branch_name without this part "remotes/">

In order to switch to branch develop you can use the following command:

$ git checkout -b develop origin/develop

Also there are tags which usually are originated from a release branch. For instance, tag 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 is originated from branch release-5.0.

To check all tags available, use:

$ git tag -l           (list all tag names)
  5.0.0
  5.0.0-alpha
  5.0.0-beta
  5.0.1

If you want to checkout a specific version given by a tag and create a local branch to work on, you can use the following git command:

$ git checkout -b <local_branch_tag_name> <one_of_tag_name_listed>

For instance, to checkout 5.0.1 you can enter the following command:

$ git checkout -b 5.0.1  5.0.1

After selecting the right branch or tag, please, read the Source Code Instructions section.