Re: Monotone workflow compared to Git workflow ( was RE: Git vs Monotone)

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:48:21 -0500
"Craig L. Ching" [off-list ref] wrote:

I have a question about this.  I asked this awhile back and didn't
really get any satisfactory answers except to use git-new-workdir, which
makes git behave a lot like monotone.  In our workflow, we do create
branches for nearly everything, but we do find that we have a need to
keep the build artifacts of those branches isolated from each other
because rebuilding is expensive.  IOW, we have this sort of workflow:

Is there a problem using git-new-workdir?  It sounds like it does
exactly what you want.

We find ourselves constantly having to shift gears and work on other
things in the middle of whatever it is we're currently working on.  For
instance, in the scenario above, A might be branch that contains a
feature going into our next release.  B might be a bugfix and takes
priority over A, so you have to leave A as-is and start work on B.  When
I come back to work on A, I have to rebuild A to continue working, and
that's just too expensive for us.  So we use the monotone-like
new-workdir which allows us to save those build artifacts.

So, that said, I ask again, am I missing something?  Is there a better
way to do this?  How do the kernel developers do this, surely they're
switching branches back and forth having to build in-between?

A decent build system will only compile the source files that actually
changed when switching branches.  Couple that with a compiler cache
(such as ccache) and switching between branches in the kernel or git
project usually isn't prohibitively time consuming.

Sean