Simplify branching

[soxofaan]

I made a couple of pull requests last week and was quite confused of the branching setup (e.g. I made my pull requests against staging branch instead of publish branch).

As far as I understand there are three permanent branches:

• main
• publish
• staging

Apparently everything from publish is automatically merged into main, but nothing else seems to happen on/with main, so I wonder what the point is of having both main and publish. The only actual difference between the two is that main is full of ugly merge commits.

It's also not clear what the purpose of staging branch is. The readme says

Staging: Branch that contains the next release of the documentation portal
... other changes (than hotfixes) are made via a PR on the staging branch.

But how relevant is this still? I guess it's not, given that I made my PRs against the wrong branch (I used staging given the README, but it should have been publish)

In summary, I wonder why this setup is so complex. I think it can be simplified to standard workflow:

• main branch, which is used to publish from
• all the rest is done through feature branches and pull request, including "next release of doc portal"

[soxofaan]

bit more context about my confusion: #613 (comment)

[soxofaan]

side-effect of the complexity: the "merge-publish-2-staging" job started failing : https://github.com/eu-cdse/documentation/actions/workflows/merge-publish-2-staging.yml