Comment by JimmieMcnulty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JimmieMcnulty | Hacker News Reader

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What? You want an "article" that describes how git branching works? Here.[0].

> Some people refer to Git’s branching model as its “killer feature,” and it certainly sets Git apart in the VCS community. Why is it so special? The way Git branches is incredibly lightweight, making branching operations nearly instantaneous, and switching back and forth between branches generally just as fast. Unlike many other VCSs, Git encourages workflows that branch and merge often, even multiple times in a day. Understanding and mastering this feature gives you a powerful and unique tool and can entirely change the way that you develop.

It's really not hard, a "local copy" is a branch.

If you can't manage what you just described trivially, you need to learn git better, because I, and everyone else who knows how to use git, can manage those things trivially, and have successfully for many years now.

Your solution was the wrong one, homegrown to avoid dealing with the reality that you and your team didn't know how git works.

All of this would be fine, by the way, had you not proposed others listen to you. Exactly zero people should do as you have described.

[0] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Branches-in-a-N...

You can't really do feature branches without knowing how branching in Git works...

> It's really not hard, a "local copy" is a branch.

For sure. Not necessarily a "feature branch" though. That's a more specific thing described in the articles I linked, building on top of the basic Git feature you linked.

I didn't say you could, I said your proposed "never use any branch other than main" was both factually incorrect (your team literally didn't do that) and not how the git tool was designed (merging branches into a main branch is trivial, and in fact how the tool was designed).

Sorry that I didn't explicitly say "local copy of the main branch". I thought that's a given. Not that it's really relevant though... Still the same problem with feature branches - if you don't integrate often the code will change under your hands and you won't be able to use the code others made until you integrate with them.

Please understand that "feature branch" is a technical term describing a very specific branching strategy - and you're not going to find its definition in the Git docs; I think it was originally defined by Atlassian (but not quite sure). A local copy of the main branch with a few additional commits that you're going to push to the origin way before the feature is complete is not a "feature branch" as commonly defined.

You're claiming what your team did wasn't "develop features in a branch", when you did precisely that.

No, I am claiming "our team didn't develop features in feature branches". Local copy of the main branch is a branch too, I know that very well. But it's definitely not a "feature branch" - it's not named after the issue number, it's merged way before the feature is complete, no PR is created, etc.

An irrelevant claim then, as the comment you originally replied to wasn’t about “feature branches”.

You originally replied talking about how hard branches are to merge, but then revealed you also use branches to develop features, thus revealing a fundamental lack of understanding about how git works.

Yeah indeed, I was the one to bring feature branches up - my original comment said that learning Git better won't help you with feature branches in case such as ours, and that what's actually needed is a workflow change - as a reply to a comment claiming that any issues could be solved by just learning the tool better, as if there was a magic command argument that'd resolve the merge conflicts resulting from this workflow, or something.

In our case we stopped using the `git branch` and `git checkout` commands whereas previously it was an integral part of our workflow, hence "not branching out" - again, sorry for not saying explicitly in that one comment that of course we worked with the local copy of the main branch which is a branch too, since that's how Git works I thought that's a given, this is a professional forum and I didn't think I need to call out everything so explicitly as if I was talking to a junior dev.

I never said that branches are hard to use nor that we didn't use them - it's only your strawman where you (since I explained what I meant so many times, it must be) intentionally misinterpret what I said about feature branches. You even sent a link to Git docs when I asked you about workflow strategy and in reply to articles talking about workflow... :-D

Feature branches are a very common workflow at many companies big and small, one could reasonably say it's the standard, practically every single team where I worked has done it this way and any change to this workflow was much discussed and temporary - and I've seen that happen only 2 times ever in my 12 years of SWE consulting career. I'm really surprised you are acting as if this was the first time you heard the term.

And - we got it already, you're a Git ninja. You can stop trying to show us your superiority now. The discussion would be much more pleasant - and I'm not saying this because you know more about Git than me, I'd be happy to learn. ;-)

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