some git thoughts, personal and feature branches

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Ian Monroe<ian at monroe.nu> wrote:
> 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

Bump! I still see a lot of "Merge branch master" commit logs. It would
be nice to get a consensus on the "rebase vs merge" debate.

Please read Ian's mail if you haven't, I think he managed to put it
all into perspective :)

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org