Subject: [sup-devel] branching and merging

From: Hamish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:26:29 +0000

Hello

I'm wondering if there are preferred strategies for the feature branches. 
I'm aware that new branches should be branched off master, and merged into
next when the author thinks they're ready. But I'm wondering when a merge has 
been done from a branch, should development continue on that branch?

I've been working on the gpgme branch, even though a number of the earlier 
commits on that branch have been merged into master. So I've been using git
cherry-pick to merge later commits into next. Is that a reasonable way to go
or should I be starting lots of little branches, or merging into next less
often? Or does it just not make much difference to the maintainers and I 
should do what works for me?

Any opinions?

Hamish
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---

From: William Morgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:01:17 +0000

Reformatted excerpts from Hamish's message of 2011-02-10:
> But I'm wondering when a merge has been done from a branch, should
> development continue on that branch?

If it's essentially more work on the same feature, then yes, continue on that
branch. Otherwise, no. Branches are cheap.

The point of a feature branch is that you can merge or not merge or revert it
without touching other features. So that should be the deciding factor on
whether to start a new feature branch: if I have to throw away, or if I have to
revert this whole branch, will I be losing extra stuff?

The other option is that if it's a long-running set of related and dependent
features, you can also call it an integration branch, merge individual feature
branches into it as necessary, and finally merge the whole thing into master in
one go. I haven't been following the gpgme changes, but it sounds like maybe
this is the case.
-- 
William <[email-masked]>
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