Re: Commiting changes onto more than one branch

Jakub Narebski wrote:

Take a look at "Resolving conflicts/dependencies between topic
branches early" blog post by Junio C Hamano (git maintainer) at
http://gitster.livejournal.com/27297.html

In short the solution is to create separate topic branch for a bugfix,
branching off earliest place where it would be relevant, then merge
this bugfix branch into all development branches you need
(e.g. maint-v3, maint-v4, maint-v5, master).

Thanks guys.  I think some cross between this and the cherry-picking
idea would work for us most of the time, if we go with the workflow
that I originally specified.  I like the branch-per-bugfix idea -- its
taking some time for me to free my mind to the point where I grok how
lightweight and flexible branching really is.  Just branch off from
the earliest affected release, naming the branch after the bug
('fix-frobulator--issue-1235').  When finished, merge/cherry-pick back
into the various branches.

Thomas's idea of using a more sophisticated workflow has definitely
got me thinking.  Back in the day, once we started working on a new
release, say v6, then the other branches to an extent become
mothballed except for bugfixes.  In that case, using a merge-base
approach would make sense.  More and more though, we have started to
build separate sub-projects on top of specific releases -- in other
words, we are simultaneously making a new product on top of v4, while
preparing to release v5, and getting ready to start work on v6 in
earnest, all the while fixing bugs across mulitple releases going all
the way back to v2.  Its getting very complicated :-).  And our
current VCS is starting to become an active hindrance in helping us
manage all this in a sane way.

What I'm going to do is set up a toy environment that mirrors what I
hope our final repository will look like.  Then I'll play with it for
a while and concoct corner-case scenarios and see how it holds up.
Once I have a workflow that I like, I can demonstrate it to my
colleagues in gitk, and we can think about how to make it better.

Thanks,
Mike Jarmy