Git Branching - Best Practices - Large project - long running branches

Hello, I work on a team of 15+ developers. We are trying to determine best practices for branching because we have had code stepped on when a developer has a long running feature branch.

We have a Development branch. Developers are instructed to create a branch when they begin working on a feature. Sometimes a feature may take a week or two to complete. So a Developer1 creates a branch and works for a week or two. In the meantime, other developers have created feature branches from Development and merged them back into Development. 

At this point we are not certain if Developer1 should: 
* Periodically merge the evolving Origin/Development into their Feature branch and when they are done work merge their feature branch into Origin/Development. 

OR 

* Stay on their pure feature branch and when they are done merge into Origin/Development. 

We have had issues with developers stepping on code when they have long running branches. We are looking for a best practices. 

Thank you, Joe Mayne

W dniu 31.03.2017 o 13:55, Mayne, Joe pisze:

This is one possible solution.

Another variant of this would be to enable rerere feature (reuse recorded resolution), and periodically do a trial merge from the Origin/Development branch to prime the rerere mechanism (discarding those merges after resolving them).

There is yet another solution:

OR

* Periodically _rebase_ pure feature branch on top of current version
of Origin/Development, or do such rebase (perhaps an interactive one
to clean-up feature development steps) before pull request, before
they are to merge feature branch into Origin/Development.

You can also try to use third-party git-imerge tool to help merging long divergent branches.

HTH,

-----Original Message-----

branches

practices for branching

feature branch. 

when they begin

complete. So a Developer1

developers have created

branch and when they

Origin/Development. 

running branches.

One key thing that may help is standards on formatting. I know that sounds silly, but many merge issues result from developers hitting the source format button and create merge problems. If you keep things to format standards, it will help merging in future. Even lengthening lines to 132 instead of 80 may reduce confusion - another silly suggestion, but I have seen it help in a couple of places.

Keep your interface classes and base classes stable. If you are changing
those during development,
you are going to impact the larger world and probably should set up a
dedicated feature branch
off of Development and have all topic branches involved in the API change
branch off that one.
Frequent merges into topic branches are common when API changes are ongoing
(as are conflicts)
- they should not be as much when the APIs are stable. If you can, get the
API changes done first,
then create topic branches after the API is stable.

From what I have seen, frequent conflicts are sometimes an indication of an underlying development process problem - you should look into this and see whether there are issues here. Conflicts happen, but the "why" is important to understand.

Cheers, Randall