I’m just trying to learn git and haven’t really been very involved with it yet.
Nice, you're in for a treat! It's a bit confusing at first. After a while you start realizing how amazing it is.
If one goal is to avoid bugs in deployment, then why not have a separate branch for development?
If you have a branch for development that is not connected to CI, you might run into a lot of issues: it means that people can basically commit anything to that branch, without ensuring that the tests are run!
When you decide to "release" that branch by merging it into the master branch, you'll run the tests, and some might fail. If a test fails there you face the "Hunt" problem I mentioned above: any one of the commits that you added to the development branch -- since the last release to master -- may be the culprit.
Another somewhat related workflow is to have a development branch where tests are run and fork a new branch for each "release". You might add a few features to the development branch, running the tests every time, and (say) once a month fork a branch. This new branch might be release-april-2019.
Quite a few large projects operate this way; those release- branches are basically feature freeze, and no new bugs are introduced. It becomes a bit tricky when bugs are found: you need to first fix them in the develop branch and then "backport" them to the release branches. If the develop branch and the release branch have diverged too much, you may have to implement the fix twice.
Thanks Nicolas, that does answer my question and of course leaves me with more to think about. You are right that git is a bit confusing at first. I understand how it works a lot more now - but the one thing I don't find online much is anything written about weird scenarios that happen when using git with a team. Mostly I have found tutorials and such - which are good to an extent but my mind naturally wonders... "what if this happens...?" Your article has helped to answer some of those questions. Good stuff. Thanks again!
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Hey Dan!
Nice, you're in for a treat! It's a bit confusing at first. After a while you start realizing how amazing it is.
If you have a branch for development that is not connected to CI, you might run into a lot of issues: it means that people can basically commit anything to that branch, without ensuring that the tests are run!
When you decide to "release" that branch by merging it into the master branch, you'll run the tests, and some might fail. If a test fails there you face the "Hunt" problem I mentioned above: any one of the commits that you added to the development branch -- since the last release to master -- may be the culprit.
Another somewhat related workflow is to have a development branch where tests are run and fork a new branch for each "release". You might add a few features to the development branch, running the tests every time, and (say) once a month fork a branch. This new branch might be
release-april-2019.Quite a few large projects operate this way; those
release-branches are basically feature freeze, and no new bugs are introduced. It becomes a bit tricky when bugs are found: you need to first fix them in the develop branch and then "backport" them to the release branches. If the develop branch and the release branch have diverged too much, you may have to implement the fix twice.Hope that answers your question!
Thanks Nicolas, that does answer my question and of course leaves me with more to think about. You are right that git is a bit confusing at first. I understand how it works a lot more now - but the one thing I don't find online much is anything written about weird scenarios that happen when using git with a team. Mostly I have found tutorials and such - which are good to an extent but my mind naturally wonders... "what if this happens...?" Your article has helped to answer some of those questions. Good stuff. Thanks again!