RE: Git Branching - Best Practices - Large project - long running branches

From: Randall S. Becker <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>
Date: Mar 31, 2017, 13:21 UTC
Message-ID: <001801d2aa21$ca45cb20$5ed16160$@nexbridge.com>
In-Reply-To: <4bb4871d8a78402bbef91231134a613b@EX1-PRD.lsac.org>

-----Original Message-----

>On March 31, 2017 7:56 AM: Joe Mayne Wrote:
>Subject: Git Branching - Best Practices - Large project - long running

branches

>I work on a team of 15+ developers. We are trying to determine best

practices for branching

>because we have had code stepped on when a developer has a long running

feature branch.

>We have a Development branch. Developers are instructed to create a branch

when they begin

>working on a feature. Sometimes a feature may take a week or two to

complete. So a Developer1

>creates a branch and works for a >week or two. In the meantime, other

developers have created

>feature branches from Development and merged them back into Development. 
>At this point we are not certain if Developer1 should: 
>* Periodically merge the evolving Origin/Development into their Feature

branch and when they

>are done work merge their feature branch into Origin/Development. 
>OR 
>* Stay on their pure feature branch and when they are done merge into

Origin/Development.

>We have had issues with developers stepping on code when they have long

running branches.

>We are looking for a best practices.

One key thing that may help is standards on formatting. I know that sounds silly, but many merge issues result from developers hitting the source format button and create merge problems. If you keep things to format standards, it will help merging in future. Even lengthening lines to 132 instead of 80 may reduce confusion - another silly suggestion, but I have seen it help in a couple of places.

Keep your interface classes and base classes stable. If you are changing
those during development,
you are going to impact the larger world and probably should set up a
dedicated feature branch
off of Development and have all topic branches involved in the API change
branch off that one.
Frequent merges into topic branches are common when API changes are ongoing
(as are conflicts)
- they should not be as much when the APIs are stable. If you can, get the
API changes done first,
then create topic branches after the API is stable.

From what I have seen, frequent conflicts are sometimes an indication of an underlying development process problem - you should look into this and see whether there are issues here. Conflicts happen, but the "why" is important to understand.

Cheers, Randall