[hibernate-dev] Branch protections: enabling selected maintainers on older branches

[Sanne Grinovero]

Hi all,

yesterday I pushed a fix on Hibernate ORM branch 5.3 by mistake and
had to apologize to Gail, since we're to be very conservative with
that branch and she needs to be able to track and approve any changes
on this specific branch.

This made me check if there was a way to express such rules on github,
and there is: the "branch protection" feature can now apply different
rules, such as requiring to be a member of a specific team, on a
specific branch.

I like that: we can allow most current committers to keep working on
any branches in active development, such as master, while only a more
restricted group can push freely on selected older branches.

Of course admins can always change the settings if there's compelling
need; in this case I like the self-imposed restriction as it would
help avoid mistakes - such as trying to be helpful when too tired.

So I enabled this on 5.3 already .. I hope you agree it's a welcome
change, but we can of course reverse this if there's strong concerns,
or if we regret it later.

Thoughts? I'd assume other Hibernate projects might want to do a
similar thing; among other benefits it might make it easier to give
push permissions to new volunteers, withouth needing to impose on them
all the responsibilities and more complex processes we have for
maintenance branches.

Thanks,
Sanne