BRANCHING.md

The branching policy for the Altien fork. Two long-lived branches: altien-main is the active development branch (branch off it, PR into it), and main is a read-only mirror of upstream LegalQuants/Donna source — the only intentional local addition to main is this policy note. The workflow: work on feature branches off altien-main; absorb upstream by updating main from upstream/main, then merging main → altien-main. upstream is push-disabled. Before creating a branch in the Altien fork, or pulling upstream.

Branching policy — Altien fork

This repository (Altien/DonnaDev, the origin remote) is a fork of the upstream source repo LegalQuants/Donna (the upstream remote, push-disabled).

The two long-lived branches

altien-main — the active development branch. All Altien work happens here. Branch off altien-main, then open a pull request into altien-main. This is the branch to check out for day-to-day work.
main — a mirror of the upstream source only. It exists so we can pull upstream changes in cleanly. Do not commit feature work to main. Treat it as read-only / upstream-tracking.

Workflow

git checkout altien-main && git pull
git checkout -b <your-branch> — branch from altien-main.
Open a PR with base altien-main.
To absorb upstream changes: update main from upstream/main (fast-forward / mirror), then merge main → altien-main.

The only intentional local addition to main is this policy note itself, so anyone who lands on main is pointed to altien-main. Keep everything else on main identical to upstream.