Git分支和合并

Question

I have a specific scenario for branching and merging explained below ::

Lets say I have a "Master" branch in a git repo. And there is a feature branch say "Feature1" taken from master on which approx 200 people will be working. Now I want to take another branch say "Team_Feature" where approx 20 people will be working. Meanwhile I have to keep "Team_Feature" branch in sync with "Feature1 Branch". After "Feature1" branch is done, it will be merged to master and New branch "Feature 2" will be taken, During all this time my team will keep working on "Team_Feature", which will be merged with "Feature 2 branch".

Now, I rebased Feature1 branch into Team_Feature, which I will be doing once every week.

Problems faced :: The second time I rebase, I got many merge conflicts, belonging to different cases mentioned below

1. Many conflicts were of type (add/add)
2. Many were (rename/delete)
3. Many were edit conflict, with the conflicts in the file that never changed in Team_Feature branch.
4. And a few of the conflicts were legitimate ones.

So, the questions are,

1. What is this add/add, rename/delete, rename/rename conflicts?
2. What causes these conflicts to trigger?
3. how to avoid them?
4. The most important doubt is number 3 in above list.

Please Help, Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Objectives:

1. Keep Feature1 in sync with master and in future merge it to master
2. Keep Team Feature in Sync with Feature1 and in in future merge to Feature2

Solution:

1. Keep merging master to Feature1 on daily basis
2. Keep merging Feature1 to Team Feature (After above point#1)
3. Once Feature2 comes to existing, keep merging Feature2 to Team Feature on daily basis.

So, the questions are,

What is this add/add, rename/delete, rename/rename conflicts?

What causes these conflicts to trigger?

--> There are lot of links to understand this, (rename/delete, rename/rename)basically it is tree level change to a file in both the branches in merge and both changes are different. Except add/add -> This is file content level conflict, like adding different contents at same line number in same file

how to avoid them?

• Avoid working with such complex branching an alternative can be to use toggles instead of feature branching.

• If you are working in feature branch model, write a mail to complete team about the area you are working on and ask them not to do tree level changes in that area like delete,rename, etc. It is much easier to solve content conflicts but painful to solve tree level conflicts.

• In the end it is not easy to avoid conflicts in big teams which works in branches.

I highly recommend using toggle in such cases to avoid complex merge conflicts. - Toggle is runtime time condition(flag) for a feature which can make that feature run in two possible way based on the toggle flag. All features are worked under toggle in only one branch.

Example:-

Lets say we are implementing a New Details page,

we will first set up a toggle whose value is stored in some file say new_details_page=true

Now in code we will have some thing like this if(new_details_page == true) { render 'newPage' }else{ render 'oldPage' }

If the work for new details page is not complete and you want to release your product with old details page, then simply build the application with that flag as false and deploy to release environment.

At the end, the best solution to avoid merge conflicts in this case is to use toggle, you can read more on internet about toggles vs feature branching.