Question

I have a several branches in my repository and I’m finding that over time it’s becoming more difficult to keep them all up to date. I can always be sure that master is up to date because it’s easy to remember and I suppose it’s my SVN mentality still lingering on.

• master
  • bugfix1
  • bugfix2
  • newfeature
    • experiment

My problem is something like this. I make changes in the bugfix2 branch, I merge the changes in to master once I’ve done my commit, but then I have several other branches out of date. I have to manually merge bugfix2 in to every other branch. As my branch list grows, I think it’s unrealistic to perform all these merge operations.

Is there a command for this or is my workflow wrong?

Answer 1

The general workflow is to merge from the most specific branch to a less specific branch.
But for a bug needed to be reported to all other branches, a simple merge to the other branches is enough and can be scripted (even aliased):

for i in $branches; do
   git checkout $i
   git merge bugfix2
done