On May 13, 2014, at 10:39 AM, Mike Alexander <[email protected]> wrote:

> On May 13, 2014, at 11:47 AM, John Ralls <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Yeah, it would be silly to merge after every commit. One strategy might be 
>> to frequently merge from master and then revert the merge if there are no 
>> conflicts. ISTM that relying on rerere in the face of ongoing development on 
>> both branches risks replaying what was the right answer with last week's 
>> code but isn't with this week's, so if there are conflicts resolved in the 
>> merge it stays so that new code builds on the resolved result rather than 
>> continuing to diverge.
>> 
>> I think merges into master should happen for every module (e.g. gncguid, 
>> gncdate) so that conflicts coming into master are limited to a single 
>> subject. That should make it a bit easier for the person doing the merge to 
>> keep track of which way to resolve the conflicts.
>> 
>> That will still produce a ladder appearance in gitk and friends. I don't 
>> find that objectionable, but apparently some people do.
> 
> I agree that merging master into topic branches frequently is a good idea.  I 
> have a long running branch where I do all my real work and merge master into 
> it often.  This seems to work well.  I've also created more short lived topic 
> branches and used them like this.
> 
> In the other direction, I think that once a topic branch is merged to master 
> it should be abandoned (unless it is used to fix bugs in the stuff that was 
> just merged).  A new topic branch should be created for subsequent changes, 
> even if they are related to the changes that were just merged (such as the 
> same changes to a different part of the code).  I'm not sure if this is what 
> you're suggesting or not, but it would seem to avoid a ladder appearance (if 
> I know what you mean by that).

It’s not. I see no reason to abandon a branch just because it’s merged into 
master, and if you really have a long-running branch where you do all of your 
work, neither do you. It won’t avoid the ladder look, either. There will just 
be a bunch of shortish branches instead of one long one.

The matter of abandoned branches reminds me that I haven’t yet cleared out all 
of the old branches that I merged into ‘archive’.

Regards,
John Ralls


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