I'm a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that's currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.

But every job I've ever had, there's at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I'm not even here to say they aren't smarter than the rest of us and I'm sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn't need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.

[–] bier@feddit.nl 9 points 2 days ago

I can see that working well especially in a project where you can push to production fairly often, our project only has 2 moments every year where new features can be pushed to production. The exception is major bugs and security patches.

Anyways our main branch is always ahead of production. New features are branched of main, and can only be merged when the entire test suite passes, this is unit tests, integration tests and automated functional tests take about 5 hours (this project has been live since 2010).

We make release branches so we can always use them for bugfixes etc.

I think it kind of depends on a project what works best. For us a main branch that is only updated twice a year wouldn't be the best way, I think.

load more comments (4 replies)