Ask HN: Do you branch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740053

by tehwebguy • 13 years ago

9 11 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Looking for some use cases from people that use git branches effectively.

Do you branch when you are building a new feature? Or only when you are making major changes? Or never? What about deployment, do you have a specific branch for Heroku or AWS?

angersock2• 13 years ago

At my current company, we use a lightly-modified GitFlow workflow:

https://www.atlassian.com/git/workflows#!workflow-gitflow

Previously, at my startup, we used long-running feature branches and merged to mainline as seemed reasonable.

Branches are pretty much the only reason to use git--and a damned fine reason they are.

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

That link is awesome, I haven't locked down a comprehensive workflow yet and this helps a lot.

angersock2• 13 years ago

No problem!

amykhar• 13 years ago

At one company, we use the Development, Test, Beta and Master branches unless we are working on a major, long-term feature. Then, we create a special branch for that. At the other company, we use one branch for every FogBugz case. They both work just fine.

smileysteve2• 13 years ago

Yes.

Master

QA/Staging that tracks master (but can be merged to first for staging environment testing)

Feature/Release branch (once the project is stable, these are more granular) get merged into QA/Staging first.

smileysteve2• 13 years ago

QA/Staging can also be used as a place where features that are functional, but not complete can be tested.

integraton• 13 years ago

See "github flow": http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html

fragmede• 13 years ago

Yes? Branching (and the speed with which "git checkout -b" runs) is half the point of git!

(Never going back to the bad old days of 'branching' in SVN.)

clockwork_189• 13 years ago

Yes. We use branches a lot at our startup. Typically our workflow goes as follows:

1) git checkout master

2) git pull // to fetch latest version

3) git branch issues/feature name

4) git checkout branch name

//...do work on branch...//

5) git add .

6) git commit -m "Description of commits"

7) repeat 5) and 6) until feature/issue is fully implemented/fixed

8) git push origin banch name

9) git checkout master

10) git merge branch name // only after the issue/feature is tested and debugged

11) git push origin master

RossM• 13 years ago

Sole developer on my project, but I run something like this (looking forward to see if it scales to multiple developers).

    - master (deployed/live version)
      - develop (next version)
        - feature/* (feature branch)
          - feature/*/* (optional sub-branches for big features)
        - fix/* (bugfix branch, may be off master if urgent)

stevoo• 13 years ago

We use mercurial. For anything that is not a small fix we branch it off. It is extremely easy, and if that doesnt work you just kill that branch and you don't worry about anything. If you are a team of 12 then branching is definetely easier than having everyone constantly pushing into the live system

Ask HN: Do you branch?

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