Managing dependent in-progress git feature branches / branch sets
feature-branch, git, workflow
Solution
I do not like pushing bad stuff for others to see, and I like to keep the final history look clean.
This is a bad habit. You should keep a `master` and a `pu` for "proposed updates". Push your commits to `pu` and then rebase `pu` onto `master` as necessary. When the time is right you can cherry pick from `pu` or even merge `pu` into `master`.
This is how it is done with the git repo itself. Avoid falling "down the rabbit hole" of endless branching.
related
Problem
In recent times I seem to have this repeating scenario of having multiple feature branches under development, with one feature branch (`feature-b` in the below picture) depending on support of another incompleted feature (developed in `feature-a`): ``` ---o---o--o master | +---o---o---o feature-a | +----o---o feature-b ``` Whenever I modify `feature-a` (including interactive rebasing to fix errors in the feature), I need to rebase `feature-b` onto `feature-a`. These are local branches, so I am free to modify them how ever I want. More often I have the following kind of case: ``` master testing ---o---o--o-------------------------------------------o---o | feature-a . . +---o---o---o . . | feature-b . . +----o---o ..................... . | feature-c . +----o---o ....................... ``` where testing branch is combination of all the (related) features under development, produced by merging all the relevant feature branches on it (in the picture `master`, `feature-b`, `feature-c` – and by implication `feature-a`). Currently, especially if having more complicated feature branch relationships, I have `gitk` constantly open to visualize the branch relationships, and maintain shell scripts to do this rebasing automatically, but this method seems fragile and a general nuisance. What I would like to know: - Is there a way of describing and even automatically detecting the branch relationships, and then with one command try to re-enforce the described relationship (in the above simple example, after changing `feature-a` by rebasing or adding new commits to the head, perform automatically rebasing `feature-b` on the new head of `feature-a`). - GUI tool for rebasing a set of branches onto other commits (simply giving error if a conflict would prevent the operation would be okay)? - Other ideas of managing this branch mess? The accidental complexity involved is costing too much time and draining too much brain power.