Top version-control frequently asked interview questions
I've been using git now for a couple months on a project with one other developer. I have several years of experience with svn, so I guess I bring a lot of baggage to the relationship.
I have heard that git is excellent for branching and merging, and so far, I just don't see it. Sure, branching is dead simple, but when I try to merge, everything goes all to hell. Now, I'm used to that from svn, but it seems to me that I just traded one sub-par versioning system for another.
My partner tells me that my problems stem from my desire to merge willy-nilly, and that I should be using rebase instead of merge in many situations. For example, here's the workflow that he's laid down:
clone the remote repo
git checkout -b my_new_feature
..work and commit some stuff
git rebase master
..work and commit some stuff
git rebase master
..finish the feature
git checkout master
git merge my_new_feature
Essentially, create a feature branch, ALWAYS rebase from master to the branch, and merge from the branch back to master. Important to note is that the branch always stays local.
Here is the workflow that I started with
clone remote repo
create my_new_feature branch on remote repo
git checkout -b --track my_new_feature origin/my_new_feature
..work, commit, push to origin/my_new_feature
git merge master (to get some changes that my partner added)
..work, commit, push to origin/my_new_feature
git merge master
..finish my_new_feature, push to origin/my_new_feature
git checkout master
git merge my_new_feature
delete remote branch
delete local branch
There are 2 essential differences (I think): I use merge always instead of rebasing, and I push my feature branch (and my feature branch commits) to the remote repo.
My reasoning for the remote branch is that I want my worked backed up as I'm working. Our repo is automatically backed up and can be restored if something goes wrong. My laptop is not, or not as thoroughly. Therefore, I hate to have code on my laptop that's not mirrored somewhere else.
My reasoning for the merge instead of rebase is that merge seems to be standard and rebase seems to be an advanced feature. My gut feeling is that what I'm trying to do is not an advanced setup, so rebase should be unnecessary. I've even perused the new Pragmatic Programming book on git, and they cover merge extensively and barely mention rebase.
Anyways, I was following my workflow on a recent branch, and when I tried to merge it back to master, it all went to hell. There were tons of conflicts with things that should have not mattered. The conflicts just made no sense to me. It took me a day to sort everything out, and eventually culminated in a forced push to the remote master, since my local master has all conflicts resolved, but the remote one still wasn't happy.
What is the "correct" workflow for something like this? Git is supposed to make branching and merging super-easy, and I'm just not seeing it.
Update 2011-04-15
This seems to be a very popular question, so I thought I'd update with my 2 years experience since I first asked.
It turns out that the original workflow is correct, at least in our case. In other words, this is what we do and it works:
clone the remote repo
git checkout -b my_new_feature
..work and commit some stuff
git rebase master
..work and commit some stuff
git rebase master
..finish the feature
git checkout master
git merge my_new_feature
In fact, our workflow is a little different, as we tend to do squash merges instead of raw merges. This allows us to turn our entire feature branch into a single commit on master. Then we delete our feature branch. This allows us to logically structure our commits on master, even if they're a little messy on our branches. So, this is what we do:
clone the remote repo
git checkout -b my_new_feature
..work and commit some stuff
git rebase master
..work and commit some stuff
git rebase master
..finish the feature
git checkout master
git merge --squash my_new_feature
git commit -m "added my_new_feature"
git branch -D my_new_feature
I've come to love git and never want to go back to SVN. If you're struggling, just stick with it and eventually you'll see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I want to get a list of all the branches in a Git repository with the "freshest" branches at the top, where the "freshest" branch is the one that's been committed to most recently (and is, therefore, more likely to be one I want to pay attention to).
Is there a way I can use Git to either (a) sort the list of branches by latest commit, or (b) get a list of branches together with each one's last-commit date, in some kind of machine-readable format?
Worst case, I could always run git branch to get a list of all the branches, parse its output, and then git log -n 1 branchname --format=format:%ci for each one, to get each branch's commit date. But this will run on a Windows box, where spinning up a new process is relatively expensive, so launching the git executable once per branch could get slow if there are a lot of branches. Is there a way to do all this with a single command?
Source: (StackOverflow)