[Tracker] General guidance about feature branches contributors. Or: I rebased the writeback branch and I feel guilty

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

Hey contributors,

I just rebased the branch 'writeback'. Because the GNOME git server
doesn't allow pushing this it meant a recreate of the branch.

I don't think anybody else was already jumping on it. But if you had
commits for this, you know the drill:

# Don't yet do git pull
git format-patch origin
mv *patch /tmp
git checkout master
git branch -D writeback
git checkout -b writeback origin/writeback
git am <your patches in /tmp>

You could try to git pull and merge all the conflicts, but there's
probably no point in doing that.

Note that Tracker's core team fairly often "uses" feature branches. By
that I mean that we fairly often rebase them and stuff. If you want to
do development in a feature branch: ensure that you keep yourself close
to the developer working on the feature, and talk with him often.

We never rebase master.

If you are working on a feature yourself a good practice, I guess, is to
branch master and always work in your feature branch. If you need to
join another branch then perhaps branch from that branch (but talk with
the developer of the feature as if it's your closest friend that you
can't miss for a single day -- you don't have to send flowers, though.
We're not your girl -and boyfriends, afaik --).

Now if two feature branches need a shared feature urgently we can also
discuss early cherry-picking stuff to master.

Code!

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be