We're moving over from Perforce to git.
In Perforce we can find out definitively if a given commit is on branchA
but not on branchB.
It doesn't use textual comparisons (c.f. "git change-id") but tracks
which changes are on which branches.
This is invaluable for managing rapidly evolving sets of release branches.
How do I go about doing this in git?
1. Cherry
"git cherry" - but surely once the change gets sufficiently mangled by
conflicts, won't it end up being "lost" ? That has certainly been my
experience in the past.
2. Merge
I could work on feature branches, and then "git merge --no-ff" the
feature branch - but when I do that I end up pulling all the intervening
history over. e.g.
- X - bugfix
/ \
A - B - C - D - E - M main
\
R relbranch
If I do "git merge bugfix" onto relbranch, then as well as getting X, I
also get B and C, which I don't want.
3. Always start from a merge base
I could tell people that if they are making a bugfix that will need to
go onto multiple branches, that they need to start from some common
merge base, and then merge to the final target branches.
That's possible, but is quite a big change from the current workflow of
working on main and then "p4 integrate" individual changes over.
And invariably people will start out thinking their change is not a
bugfix, but a new feature, and then find that actually we need the new
feature on the release branch.
4. Use gerrit change-ids
We could adopt gerrit change-ids. It feels like this is kind of a
kludge, but perhaps it's the only thing that really works?
Is there something better?
Thanks!
Luke
