[Python-Dev] My fork lacks a 3.7 branch - can I create it somehow?

[Ned Deily]

On May 22, 2018, at 18:51, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> [Ivan Pozdeev]:
>> You don't really need copies of official branches on your Github fork
>> if you're not a maintainer for these branches.
> I explicitly wanted to run with 3.7 in the run-up to release. On that
> branch, the built ./python reports 3.7.0b4+ at startup. Master tells me
> 3.8.0a0 on startup. Since my local repo is a clone of my fork, it made
> sense to me to have a 3.7 branch on my fork which I could switch to. Am I
> only nutcase who thinks that might be mildly useful? (Or that if I want to
> test an application across multiple versions using tox that it makes sense
> to have pre-release visibility of point releases.)

No, what you what you want to do makes perfect sense.  It sounds like Ivan is used to projects with a somewhat different workflow than ours.  We don't have "branch maintainers"; core-developers are responsible themselves for merging changes into all appropriate branches.  While these days some of the backporting can be semi-automated, thanks to the backport bot, but it is still up to the core developer to decide whether a change can and should be backported, so having all active branches available in a local repo is a pretty much a necessity.

As always, the Developer's Guide should be able to answer questions like this:

https://devguide.python.org/devcycle/

--
  Ned Deily
  nad at python.org -- []