Re: Project- vs. Package-Level Branching in Git

From: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date: Jan 27, 2011, 20:09 UTC
Message-ID: <4D41D103.4080502@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <14F4737F-E8E4-4E4E-A625-16CA63CF9EFF@shaggyfrog.com>

On 01/27/2011 08:38 PM, Thomas Hauk wrote:

Show 31 quoted lines

> Back when I worked at a large games company, we used Perforce, and
> our repo structure looked a little something like this:
> 
> /branches /alpha /beta /mainline /packages /external /foolib /1.0 
> /1.1 /2.0 /internal /barlib /dev /1.0 /2.0 /bazlib /2.34 /2.35 /qux 
> /dev
> 
> At the package level, we would split up packages/libraries into two
> groups based on if they were developed at the company or not
> (external/internal), and inside each one, we might have multiple
> versions. In the example above, the repo is for the "qux" game, which
> uses an internal "bazlib" library developed by another group, and the
> "barlib" library which was developed for use on "qux" and may be used
> simultaneously on other projects.
> 
> Project-level branches took mainline as a base and branched into the
> /branches directory. Package-level branches would usually take the
> "dev" version (which represented the current development version,
> akin to "master" in Git) as a base and branch into the same parent
> directory but with an actual version name.
> 
> I've successfully used this repo structure with several other
> projects over the years at other companies (who were mostly using
> Subversion). Now I'm trying to get into the Git swing of things, but
> it seems to be that Git only offers project-level branching, and
> doesn't allow for the kind of package-level branching I'm describing
> here.
> 
> Am I incorrect or is there a way to accomplish with Git what I was
> doing before with P4 and SVN?
>

You're correct. There's no way to accomplish what you wish to do inside git. I'd suggest submodules, but that still doesn't get you the per-directory branching inside a git repository, even though it does make it rather trivial to change versions at will.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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