Question

I work in a small development office, with 7 programmers, and we’re currently implementing Git version control — we had no version control system before. Better late than never, right?

Having said that, we’re thinking about implementing the following structure:

Development server

• Main repository – development’s stable version
• Developer repositories – development repositories, one for each developer

Testing server

• Main repository – stable testing version. modifications are pushed from the main development repository

Production server

• Main repository – modifications are pushed from the main testing repository

Is this structure appropriate or am I missing the point of distributed version control systems? Can someone throw me some pointers or practical examples?

Edit1:

I appreciate all of your feedback, guys – things are clearer now. I understand that a structure like developer repos (local), development (bare) repo, testing repo and production repo would be a more logical choice and I can even see why some consider the development repo an unnecessary step.

I guess we’ll do some tests and see which structure we like the most.
Thanks

Answer 1

This is more or less about it. These are somethings you should note though:

• Make the “Main repository” on development server a bare repository.
• The developers don’t need to have a repository for themselves on the server, but they have a copy of the main repository locally on their own computers.
• Every developer should fetch/merge from the main development repository and resolve conflicts before pushing back.
• Don’t push to the test and production servers. From those repositories, fetch and merge from development and test servers respectively. This is because those repositories are not bare, and may in fact have commits of their own.
• Have one guy (or one of the developers) responsible for fetching changes from the test/production servers, merge them with the current stable and push them to the main repository. This way, bug fixes in the test server are merged back in the development.