How stable is master?

The title says it all, how stable do you consider the master branch to be?

Would you advise for or against using it for project currently heavy development ?

( We’re fine If things breaks once in a while )

Currently, before version 5.0.0, I don’t recommend the master branch for any environments in which Parse Server has to work reliably.

The reason is that master currently contains some breaking changes of fundamental features that were not phased-in, so their maturity is unknown.

In addition, the current branch system only has a single branch (master) into which all PRs are merged. There are no pre-release branches that accumulate PRs for at least a few days for bugs that may be discovered only shortly after a merge. For example, the docker building process broke for a few days on master last week.

Also, in the current branch system we may merge a few more breaking changes into master without phasing-in. It is possible that master suddenly breaks your deployment. We do this before releasing 5.0.0 because master already contains breaking changes and we are in the process of changing the branch system. After 5.0.0 that won’t happen anymore, but the purpose of master also won’t be the same anymore.

If you ask how stable a specific commit on master it, that depends on what has been merged up to that commit. You can look into the changelog which should be up-to-date.

Keep in mind that if you use master for development, your code may not work (the same way) with an official release of Parse Server in production.

We are aware this is an inconvenience, so with 5.0.0 we are planning a shift to fixed release cycles and introduce distribution / pre-release channels for Parse Server with multiple branches. This will make it possible to better mature features and you can decide whether you want to use a “stable”, “semi-stable” or “bleeding edge” (currently master branch) version of Parse Server.

Ok, great thanks!

I have a few PR in their way and ill keep working on our 4.5.0 branch and cherry pick them in master when ready.

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