git-flow如何拥有演示分支？

Question

We are a small team and work on a project using git and git-flow. Most of the time we develop towards one goal, so creating a feature and merging it when done to the develop branch works fine.

But now we are in the situation were we have multiple features, but we would want to only deploy a few features at a time and demo some other features. I can't see a good way of doing this, so the only idea we have is to manually create a demo branch, merge the features we want to merge there and deploy it (for demo only). And once we decide that those features will be deployed, then we "git flow feature finish xxx" and do a deployment (as git-flow indicates).

We can do all that, but I was looking for best practices on how to approach this issue. I found this stackoverflow question which is similar to what I have but the answer is not satisfactory. So here I am.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Just create a demo branch out of develop and merge the features you want to demo:

$ git checkout develop

$ git branch demo

$ git checkout demo

$ git merge feature1

$ git merge feature2

This is completely legit. It is cool if you have a mechanism (like git hook) to automatically deploy such a branch to some demo environment.

Answer 2

The formal Git Flow document has reference to a release branch. Here I'd imagine that you would want to integrate all of the features that you have ready to go before release.

That branch seems to be the most ideal to showcase/demo what's upcoming in your releases. It should also be the branch that QA is testing fervently before it's merged up into master.

Git can't manage the part about you not knowing which features are slated for a release, but if your project managers and your team work closely with each other, merging features like that to the release branch should work out well.