Re: Is there a way to have local changes in a branch 'bake' while working in different branches?

From: Aaron Schrab <aaron@schrab.com>
Date: Dec 15, 2016, 22:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20161215224408.GE2023@pug.qqx.org>
In-Reply-To: <14b481f95c5043aca6cdfddfe4728fa9@BLUPR79MB001.MGDADSK.autodesk.com>

At 20:14 +0000 15 Dec 2016, Larry Minton <larry.minton@autodesk.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>Let's say I have a code change that I want to 'bake' for a while 
>locally, just to make sure some edge case doesn't pop up while I am 
>working on other things.  Is there any practical way of doing that?
>I could constantly merge that 'bake me' branch into other branches as I 
>work on them and then remove those changes from the branches before 
>sending them out for code review, but sooner or later pretty much 
>guaranteed to screw that up....

That sounds like the best way to me. How do you envision screwing it up?

If you anticipate messing up while removing the changes, that's only likely if there are conflicts and any other strategy is likely to be worse there.

If you suspect you'll forget to remove them before sending for code review there may be ways to help with that. Easiest you can add a large notice in the commit message(s) and/or comments; this may not prevent going for review but reviewers should catch it pretty quickly. To help prevent it even getting that far you may be able to add a pre-push hook to prevent such commits from being pushed to somewhere other than a private fork or a branch with a name that clearly indicates that it contains experimental code.