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GitFlow considered harmful

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Re: GitFlow considered harmful

#4

Post by Mithaldu »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #3

I like to be able to (temporarily) revert an entire feature branch, which merge commits help with. Is there a way to easily do this without them?

If i understand you right, you want to do this:

    - Checkout master.
    - Start an interactive rebase of master onto the last
      commit before the series of commits you wish to remove.
    - Mark all the commits you don't care about as "skip".
    - Let the rebase run and resolve conflicts on the way,
      the same as you'd do with your current work flow.

Re: GitFlow considered harmful

#5

Post by jerf »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #3

I like to be able to (temporarily) revert an entire feature branch, which merge commits help with. Is there a way to easily do this without them?

It is not quite as easy or quite as reliable as it with merges, but generally "branches" come in as recognizable chunks of commits, and you can either revert them with a range, or interactively rebase them out of existence, depending on your goals. It's generally not very difficult, but in some cases it may be.

I'd also suggest that you want to make sure you consider the full totality of costs, because it's very humanly easy to see this one feature that you recall using a lot, when in fact you can easily recall it precisely because it is a rare event (and thus worthy of memory), whereas the costs of a complicated branching structure are continuous and ongoing.

I'm not saying that linear is therefore guaranteed to win for you, just pointing out the cognitive danger of seeing the big, rare expensive costs and missing the continual drip of small ones.

That said, I'm not necessarily 100% linear myself, but I do sometimes feel like git made branches easy and some people overreacted. If you've got a branch that lived for at least, say, a week, and had significant independent work within it, then by all means merge it and keep a merge commit. But this workflow creates branches upon branches upon branches, and then keeps them around forever in the history. I'm not convinced that last bit is necessarily a good thing... I create a ton of branches, sure, but I only keep big ones that actually mean something, not every little bug branch with one commit of one line. There is a happy medium available here, too.

Re: GitFlow considered harmful

#7

Post by ryanthejuggler »

> ...the history of a project managed using GitFlow for some time invariably starts to resemble a giant ball of spaghetti. Try to find out how the project progressed from something like this...

It's simple. Read backwards down the `develop` branch and read off the `feature/whatever` branches. Just because the graph isn't "pretty" doesn't mean it's useless.

In general, I'm starting to dislike "XXX considered harmful" articles. It seems to me like you can spout any opinion under a title of that format and generate lingering doubt, even if the article itself doesn't hold water. Not to generalize, of course--not all "XXX considered harmful" articles are harmful. They generally make at least some good points. I just think the title format feels kind of clickbaity at this point.

That said, kudos to the author for suggesting an alternative rather than just enumerating the shortcomings of GitFlow.

Re: GitFlow considered harmful

#9

Post by jacobparker »

> I thought it was a weird, over-engineered solution to a non-existent problem.

To be fair, its a cookie-cutter approach that resonates with people unfamiliar with git but not ready/willing to invest the time to understand it deeply. That is understandable; a lot of people come from other systems and just need to get going right away and gits poor reputation for command-line consistency etc. is well-earned.

(To be clear, I am not a fan of git flow.)

If anyone is interested in truly understanding git, start here: http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf

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