Re: [gentoo-dev] Developer branches on proj/gentoo

[William Hubbs]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 04:12:29PM +0200, hasufell wrote:
> On 08/11/2015 03:52 PM, Patrice Clement wrote:
> > Hi there
> >
> > According to https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_git_workflow#Branching_Model,
> > "there may be developer-specific, task-specific, project-specific branches
> > etc". As far as I understand, it means I can go and create my own branch on the
> > main repository and push it and it gets spread all over the place. Is that
> > correct?
> >
> > Could someone explain to me the rationale behind this decision?
> >
> > Truth to be told, I kinda dislike the fact any developer can do this.
> >
> > proj/gentoo should be kept for "serious business" i.e. commits that affects the
> > tree. On the long run, if everybody goes down that road, we will see flourish
> > numerous branches (who said unmaintained?), all stalled at a different state of
> > the main repo, and it will only generate a lot of noise and confusion for
> > nothing. Further, since we've moved over to git, the main tree now gets
> > replicated to github and we all have github accounts here, don't we? Which makes
> > the whole forking and submitting PRs a cinch.
> >
> > If a developer wants to tinker with the tree, he can fork it to its github
> > devspace, fiddle around, and later on send us a PR back with his changes to
> > merge.
> >
>
> Branches can still make sense, even if the model is that everyone has
> his own fork, see
> http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
> for an example.
>
> I currently don't see a reason to limit the workflow to one master branch.
>
> It doesn't necessarily generate noise or confusion and there are various
> ways to only fetch specific branches if you really need to do so. Git's
> main advantage _are_ branches and it has sufficient methods to deal with
> a lot of them.
>
> If they cause trouble, we can still prune them and enforce stricter
> rules, but since we don't even know how they will be used, this point is
> moot yet.
 
 I'm with mgorny and hasufell on this; I'm not worried about regulating
 branches that much.

Also, since we have our own tree on g.g.o, the tree on github is a
mirror, so we should treat it as such, e.g. it could go down at any
point, and if it does, we can keep working based on our official tree.

There's even a way in git itself to do something like a github pull
request (see the git request-pull command), so we don't need to rely on
github for that.

William