some git thoughts, personal and feature branches

[Ian Monroe]

First off I don't really understand why everyone went and made
personal repos, its like people thought they were required (most seem
unused). I think its just causing confusion. Unless you want a pretty
handy way to share your work as you work on it, just commit and push
to the mainline repo. Its more straightforward and also a handy way to
share your work. :)

So to define (at least how I use these words):
mainline: the new trunk
personal branch: basically this is your local work that you decided to
publish. No one else has commit rights to it. Likely you'll merge the
work here relatively quickly into mainline.
feature branch: working on some new feature with 1 or more other
developers. Might go weeks or months without merging into mainline.

But anyways, on a personal branch, where remote 'origin' is Amarok mainline.
to sync with master:
git checkout personal-branch
git remote update
git rebase origin/master
git push -f

push -f is needed since rebase changes history. push -f is bad if
other people are making commits to your personal branch, since they
will be pretty screwed if. But then its not a personal branch, its a
feature branch by definition. :)

so to merge master on a feature branch:
git checkout somefeature
git remote update
git merge origin/master
git push

And then weeks later when you finish the feature branch, and let
everyone else know:
git remote update
git rebase origin/master
git push -f #update feature branch
git push origin somefeature:master #merge into mainline

So push -f still isn't requried for merging into mainline isn't
required (which is good, since its impossible) since rebase has only
been editing the history of commits that aren't in mainline.

The key is to not mix up whether its a personal branch or a feature
branch. :) You can't rebase and then expect a plain 'push' to work to
your personal branch. And if this is all really confusing for you,
stop publishing your personal branches and just use mainline. :P

Ian
(not putting into wiki yet since I only document stuff after testing
thoroughly, which I haven't for this :D)