Yes, I just made up that acronym, but I like it. ;-)
I thought I would bring this discussion (that some of us were having on my
recent Pull Request) to the list.
If you haven't been following the GitHub conversation... I made an off-hand
comment about how I fetched, fixed up, rebased on libmesh/master and pushed
my patch instead of using "pull" (or merging through GitHub) so that my
patch went in cleanly without any merge commits.
This prompted a bit of discussion... where Ben said he thought that you
shouldn't rebase public branches. I was going to respond with:
There is nothing wrong with rebasing feature branches. You don't want to
rebase _master_ (or any long lived multiply shared branch that is going to
continue to be shared for a long time).
For instance, I rebased my precond_fix branch on master so that I could
cleanly push it (no merge commit!). I also pushed the rebased branch
(using --force) back to my libMesh fork. Did the world explode? Did
everyone instantly die? Nope. No one cares because the worst that was
going to happen is if one of you guys had pulled that branch to check my
changes you would get a forced update next time you pulled that branch
again. No one was building lots of patches on top of my branch or merging
it with other feature branches or anything else bizarre.
You don't have to take my word for it though. Look at the diaspora
development wiki here:
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Git-Workflow
They are using the model that Roy was talking about earlier on the list...
and let me point you to this main bullet point:
*Do not merge* the upstream develop with your feature branch; *rebase* your
branch on top of the upstream develop.
Those bold words are theirs... not mine.... but I wholeheartedly agree.
Our little feature branches should always be rebased before being pushed to
master... which means no merge commits (with our current repo structure).
If we ever go to a more involved structure with multiple long-lived
branches (like a development branch, master, and release branches) then we
will have merges when we merge back and forth between those.
Feature branches should never generate merge commits.
Derek
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