Source branches

Branching process

Though Linden Lab doesn't provide a public version control repository, it's useful to understand how Linden Lab deals with branches for understanding the code drops above.

Linden Lab does feature development on independent branches. As those features mature, they are merged into the "release-candidate" branch. The QA_Portal group tests the feature, and either reject or approve it for inclusion in "release". When a major release is about to happen, a branch is created for work on that release (e.g. "Branch_1-13-2"), which gets synced with the "release" branch periodically. Then, stability work is done on the branch, and the new code is deployed. After that, any stability work gets merged back into "release", and the process repeats for the next major release. In the meantime, stability work continues on the branch for maintenance releases.

Note that the dated releases (e.g. 20070117a) are sourced from the working trunk (the "release" branch), and the numbered releases (e.g. 1.13.2.xx) are to sync with the official viewer releases. This means that often, but not always, the dated releases are newer.