Workflow problem resulting in useless commit messages

[Michael Alan Dorman]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:29:56 +1100
"Andrew King" <eurokang at gmail.com> wrote:

> We have a mainline called trunk.
> 
> We have a number of developers, each using their own branched version
> of trunk where they do work, lets say adding feature X.
> 
> Lets say I make some progress on the feature, then I commit.
> 
> I then try and keep up to date with trunk, because I want to have as
> few conflicts as possible in the long term.

I think this is most people's intuition of an appropriate workflow.

That said, my development group has found that if you make a discipline
of using focused feature branches, rather than doing all your work in
one branch with the often random code-churn that can result in, then for
the most part, you won't get conflicts when your code gets merged into
the trunk, and then you can just do merge --pull back from the trunk
into your branch.

We tried this in part because I noticed that Linus Torvalds was
complaining about the same thing (albeit in the context of GIT), and
suggested that it was better for you to develop your feature in its
context and worry about conflicts when it comes time to merge.

What I've found is that we very rarely have conflicts, and when we do,
it is often because someone has let unrelated changes creep in.

YMMV, of course, but it can work.

Mike.