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

[hasufell <hasufell@gentoo.org>]

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.