Hi, Ok with your change to the GitFlow process in step 3 you'll have to be careful about doing that merge back to master in step 4, in fact I'd say just don't do it. The reason is that you'll be diverging mater from develop and it'll soon become difficult if not impossible to manage and I wouldn't be surprised if things go wrong quickly, I could be wrong though. I think you might also find picking key commits from the develop branch to merge into your release branch is easier to say than do and that's not a Git limitation it'll be hard in any VCS I can think of. It does depend on what your tracking and the nature of the changes, so if every commit works on a different file and one commit never depends on a previous commit you might not have a problem but typically that's not a very common scenario (IMO). The whole GitFlow process is about working on features independently but being able to stitch features together when bringing them back to product as a complete feature so the develop branch at any single point in time represents *the* completed feature set of the product and could be released.
From what it sounds like you want to achieve I wonder whether it would work if you merged the feature branches into release branches. So rather than merge everything into develop and then try to pick key features and merge them across into a release you would merge the feature branches you want into the release branches that feature is meant to appear in. Quite what the process would be with regards with what to do after the release is done I'm not sure. By diverging the release branch from the develop branch you're effectively creating a fork (or be merging particular feature branches into the release branches). Those forks aren't really in a position for merging back into develop or master either. If I'm honest it sounds like you might be better using a *Feature Toggle<http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureToggle.html> * mechanism in your software (if that's what you're tracking) and then just follow the vanilla GitFlow process for developing features. I realise Feature Toggles are often advertised as being an alternative to the Feature Branch model but I think they can be mutually beneficial rather than mutually exclusive but that's probably a discussion for somewhere else :) HTH Cheers, Alex On Tuesday, May 21, 2013 11:39:30 PM UTC+1, Tony Quilkey wrote: > > Hi, > > I am looking at formulating and then documenting our vcs workflow > using Git at work. I have an idea of how I want things to work, but am > a little hazy on some of the details. > > Our basic workflow will be based around: > http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model, with a few > exceptions. > > We would like to create our release-* branches from the last release > tag. From there, we would like the ability to cherry pick (or take the > complete diff) commits from the develop branch. > > So, we are after is: > > 1) Create topic (feature) branches from develop, and merge back into > develop when complete. > > 2) Once it is decided we are packaging a release, make a release-* > branch from the previous release tag. > > 3) Cherry pick/merge/whatever any commits we want from develop into > the new release-* until it is complete. > > 4) Merge the new release-* branch into master and tag it. > > Repeat as necessary. > > At the moment I am a little stuck on how exactly we can cherry pick > stuff from develop into a release-* branch. I'm not even sure this > approach is exactly what we should be doing, but we definitely need > the opportunity here to filter stuff going into production. > > Our main concern is that at this stage, there is no guarantee that all > commits within develop can be pulled into a release. > > In regards to how we can achieve the above results any input would be > much appreciated. Or if there are any other better options available, > I'm all ears. > > Thanks, > > Tony Quilkey > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Git for human beings" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to git-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
