I have two development branches in git and I frequently need to change between the two. However, the really frustrating thing is that every time I change branches in git, the entire project gets rebuilt because the file-system timestamps for some files will change.
Ofc, the makefiles are configured to build the project into two different build directories .
Is there any way around this? Compilation is a very long and time-consuming process…
Edit:- This is a slightly more detailed explanation of the question…
Say I have a header files Basic.h which is included in a number of other files. Basic.h is different between branch 1 and branch 2.
Now let’s say I have compiled branch 1 into build_branch1 and branch 2 into build_branch2. Say I have branch 2 currently checked out. Now I checkout branch 1 and change File1.cpp and recompile. Ideally, since only File1.cpp has changed since I compiled it the last time, this is the only file that should be recompiled.
However, since Basic.h has it’s timestamp changed due to the checkout, all files that are including Basic.h will get recompiled. I want to avoid this.
Git changes only the files that are updated between branches. But if your compiler does a full rebuild even if any single file was changed you can always clone and checkout your different branches into different directories. That’s like:
This takes extra disk space but is much more convenient than switching divergent branches in a huge repo.