Help designing work flow

I know we (my group) should use "topic" branches and apply them back to the dev branch when done. There is concern that the commit history gets too full of detailed stuff, especially with several developers, that you can't tell what "really changed". So, our dev branch should appear to contain only commit nodes representing completed assignments; not every day's checkpoint and trying to keep one's own stuff on top to avoid merging later.

I guess that's how it is on these Open Source projects where patches are submitted by email and applied by the maintainer. We don't see the details, just the final patch. But, my situation will be developers gathered around an in-house master repo, and everyone should be able to push their own changes as assignments are completed.

What is the best procedure to achieve that? Or what are some good alternatives with trade-offs?

I see that if a topic branch is merged (disabling FF if applicable), the main line (leftmost parent) will be a history of completed topics. But, we don't need to keep the detailed side-branches forever, and even if gitk and other visualization tools can be told to just show the main line, advanced use such as git log this..that will forever be packed with the micro-details.

So, unless someone has more input along that line, I'm assuming that we want to apply the completed topic as a single-parent commit. That is the natural result if preparing patches and then applying them, but is there a simpler, direct way to do that in git?

The detailed topic branches can be kept around for a while, for the original author to extend if it needs to be returned to, and to examine if the gestalt change in the single commit is too overwhelming to understand, or to help figure out what might have broken. But after a while they can be deleted and then gc will free up the disk space.

Anything else I should look into?

--John

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