Re: "groups of files" in Git?

From: Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 11, 2017, 17:39 UTC
Message-ID: <B5FDF25C-ED5A-4CD1-AAD7-04BD8D705C59@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAEcERAz3vYekvJ8SM1FfdAVsP3LMVqA1O3yoJVThvg-0fPtVCg@mail.gmail.com>

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> On 11 Jul 2017, at 17:45, Nikolay Shustov <nikolay.shustov@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I have been recently struggling with migrating my development workflow
> from Perforce to Git, all because of the following thing:
> 
> I have to work on several features in the same code tree parallel, in
> the same Perforce workspace. The major reason why I cannot work on one
> feature then on another is just because I have to make sure that the
> changes in the related areas of the product play together well.
> 
> With Perforce, I can have multiple changelists opened, that group the
> changed files as needed.
> 
> With Git I cannot seem to finding the possibility to figure out how to
> achieve the same result. And the problem is that putting change sets
> on different Git branches (or workdirs, or whatever Git offers that
> makes the changes to be NOT in the same source tree) is not a viable
> option from me as I would have to re-build code as I re-integrate the
> changes between the branches (or whatever changes separation Git
> feature is used).
> Build takes time and resources and considering that I have to do it on
> multiple platforms (I do cross-platform development) it really
> denominates the option of not having multiple changes in the same code
> tree.
> 
> Am I ignorant about some Git feature/way of using Git that would help?
> Is it worth considering adding to Git a feature like "group of files"
> that would offer some virtutal grouping of the locally changed files
> in the checked-out branch?

Interesting question that came up at my workplace, too.

Here is what I suggested:
1. Keep working on a single branch and make commits for all features
2. If you make a commit, prefix the commit message with the feature name
3. After you are done with a feature create a new feature branch based on
   your combined feature branch. Use `git rebase -i` [1] to remove all
   commits that are not relevant for the feature. Alternatively you could
   cherry pick the relevant commits [2] if this is faster.

I wonder what others think about this solution. Maybe there is a better solution that I overlooked?

- Lars

[1] https://robots.thoughtbot.com/git-interactive-rebase-squash-amend-rewriting-history [2] http://think-like-a-git.net/sections/rebase-from-the-ground-up/cherry-picking-explained.html