Question

I am just now starting to use version control and my head is spinning! I am trying to wrap my head around branches, checkout, merging and rebasing. I’m sure these are stupid questions but would really appreciate some help.

My projects are PHP. I am using Aptana studio for my IDE, Bitbucket and SourceTree for Git GUI.

So I think I might have a rough idea on how this is supposed to work now. Please tell me where I am wrong.

Say I want to add a new feature. I have a master branch. In Aptana I can right click a file → Go to team, and then create a new branch. I can name that branch feature a1bc. I make my changes.

Once I am done with this feature and all the changes I click Team → Commit, then Team → Merge branch → master. This merges my changes back into the master repo.

Is this roughly how I would go about doing feature adds, etc.? Also what do I do if I have 100+ features as time goes on? Do I keep all those feature branches or delete them after they are merged back in?

Answer 1

You need to decide if you merge back in master as a fast-forward merge or not:

Since branches are made to isolate a work (see “When should you branch“), you can regularly incorporate your feature branch into master, while continuing the development of said feature on the feature branch.
In that scenario, a merge --no-ff is advisable (and, considering Aptana defaults, might better be done in command-line).

However, if you made a branch to isolate a short-live development, you can incorporate back your feature branch in master through a fast-forward merge (in order to “blend” completely the two branches).
If master had some commits while you were developing feature, you will need to rebase feature on top of master first, then merge feature in master (this will be fast-forward).

For more, see:

• “Why does git use fast-forward merging by default?“
• “git rebase vs git merge“