RE: git pull on Linux/ACPI release tree

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Jan 9, 2006, 23:07 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0601091502200.5588@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20060109225143.60520.qmail@web31807.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Luben Tuikov wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> 
> Yes.  Ever since I started used git, I never used branch
> switching, but I do have git branches and I do use git branching.
> 
> I basically have a branch per directory, whereby the object db
> is shared as is remotes/refs/etc, HEAD and index are not shared
> of course.
> 
> This allows me to do a simple and fast "cd" to change/go to a
> different branch, since they are in different directories.
> So the time I wait to switch branches is the time the filesystem
> takes to do a "cd".
> 
> This also allows me to build/test/patch/work on branches
> simultaneously.

Yes. It has many advantages, and it's the approach I pushed pretty hard originally, but the "many branches in the same tree" approach seems to have become the more common one. Using many branches in the same tree is definitely the better approach for _distribution_, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the better one for development.

For example, you can have a git distribution tree with 20 different branches on kernel.org, but do development in 20 different trees with just one branch active - and when you do a "git push" to push out your branch in your development tree, it just updates that one branch on the distribution site.

So git certainly supports that kind of behaviour, but nobody I know actually does it that way (not even me, but since I tend to just merge other peoples code, I don't actually have multiple branches: I create temporary branches for one-off things, but don't maintain them that way).

			Linus