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Question

I think I'm not quite grasping the reason behind branches in Git.

I'm developing an application which makes use of a framework.

Could I run two branches one with the app and another branch for the framework? Or should I branch away when I want to update the framework, fix any possible bugs and then merge it back in?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Branches are for organizing different aspects of development on a project.

For example: You have your framework working. You decide that you want to reorganize the code for a new feature or want to work on a feature that you aren't sure about releasing. So you create a branch and work on it there. Meanwhile, you find that your framework has a bug in it. You are able to go back to the original branch, create the bug fix and release that.

You can have multiple avenues of development going on at the same time keeping them separate until you are ready to do something with them.

The use case that you are talking with an app and a framework would be to have seperate repositories for those. Rather than branching.

Answer 2

Look into submodules... you could submodule the framework to keep it separated from your application code.

Branches are generally used for features... so any time you are creating a new piece of functionality or fixing a bug you might create a branch to work on the feature/bug and then you would merge it into your master branch when you are done.

You would then also create a new branch when it comes time to update the framework submodule.

Answer 3

If you want to make it so changing a skeleton framework can be easily merged back into the project, you have the idea almost right.

It's not the framework that should be branched away from your project, but your project should be branched away from your framework.

And what you would do is any time you're developing something specific to your project, make the changes on your project path, and if you're developing something for the general framework, you make those changes on the framework branch.

And if you want to update your project to use the latest version of your framework, then on your project branch, just merge with the commit you feel is most stable on the framework branch.

You can keep doing this over and over again, updating your project to use the latest version of the framework, keeping your framework branch separate and reusable for other projects.

Warning: never be on your framework branch and merge with your project. Only do it the other way around.

Answer 4

Here is a Git workflow that works great for me and really cemented the idea of branching into my head.

Basically, you have 2 main branches(master, develop). From each of these, you can create a new sub-branch to work on features, bugs/hotfixes, etc..

This allows you to keep a clean master(live) version of your application that you can apply hotfixes to, as well as merge those hotfixes back into your develop and develop sub-branches once those hotfixes are ready.

There's quite a few other benefits to this workflow - noted in the article.

There's also a Git plugin that makes using this workflow a bit simpler.