Git wiki page

[John Ralls]

On May 17, 2013, at 10:09 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> 
> There is one section in particular that will need improvement: branching and merging in a 
> pure git environment. This should be a summary of our future git workflow strategy. We had a 
> first discussion about this some time ago, but I think it's worth looking at what other projects 
> are doing. I don't have enough git experience to come up with best practices. On the page I 
> have added two links to specific git workflows that could serve as a starting point for 
> discussion on this topic.
> 
> Feel free to update the page with every improvement you can think of.

Most of my non-Gnucash git experience comes from the Gnome repos, where rebasing
is the standard behavior. It's not a practice I like, but I imagine that they had
an SVN transition period just like we have and got into that habit.

I do think that we should encourage all non-trivial changes to happen in feature branches which are then merged (with --no-ff to force a merge commit for generating news) and deleted -- for the most part those feature branches are never published, so only the canonical repo doesn't get clogged with branches. In fact, even published branches can get pruned once they've been merged, since git retains the history correctly and a 'branch' is just a ref to its HEAD. That keeps the branches list manageable.

Regards,
John Ralls