Last week’s release of 0.8.1 was Flot’s first-ever point-release. One of the reasons why we haven’t had them in the past is because our branching scheme didn’t support it.

Before 0.8, every pull request and fix was merged straight into master, making it always the latest version of the library. This was easy to understand, but prevented us from releasing minor fixes separate from major changes that we knew were incomplete or still needed more testing.

</img>

You may have already noticed that after the release of 0.8 we added a couple of new branches: 0.9-work and code-cleanup. Now master represents the stable release - currently 0.8.2 - while new features and major releases are given separate branches. Feature branches are merged into the next major-release branch on completion, and when the release is ready it is merged into master.

All this time, we can continue merging minor fixes into master. This lets us ship point-releases to get those changes out to you faster, so you don’t have to wait until the next major-release to use them safely in production.

After every point-release we merge back into the next major-release branch, to keep it up-to-date as work continues.

This is great for users, but it does mean that those of you contributing pull requests need to do a little more to ensure that you’re working from the correct branch. If your contribution is anything beyond a bug fix - if it adds a feature or changes the API in any way - then you should base against the 0.9-work branch.

As always, please try to follow Flot’s contribution guidelines. We will soon begin requiring that new code pass our automated JSHint before we’ll merge it. It’s just a good idea in general; it makes the merge easy for us so we have more time to work on new features for you.