Question

Recently I’ve started working in Git with team of 8 people.
We decided that it’s a good practice to work separately in each personal branch (someone read about it somewhere).
After working in such topology a little while, I’ve got pissed of how much time takes to get/merge changes from master and push/merge it back.
Half of time that I’m spending on issue – takes to merge with someone’s changes.

I want to have latest changes from master every 2 hours. But each time I have to spend time to merge them into my branch.

I assume that git is ok and we have chosen wrong workflow. Ho can we avoid frequent merges and always have latest master checked in ?

UPD.

As Neil noticed correctly – some of us are working simultaneosly on one piece of code. That we will get merges in other VCS’es – it’s true. but not so often as in git !

For example: I wanted to rename class in the project. This class is using broadly in project. I’ve made it in my branch. Ok, I’ve got each time that i’m pulling from master – merges from my teammate. Then I’ve decided to finally merge it to master. Another one merge. I’ve made it. Then my teammate pulls and got another merge. So time what spends on merges in team is litterally wasted.

I’m not blaming git. I think there is simply better workflow for this. Now we have decided to refuse using branches and work directly with master hoping that no one will broke our build.

UPD. 2

Also its often happens that I’m getting merge with code that I’ve never modified. This is odd, as I have to resolve conflicts on code that I’ve got no idea about. May be there is also some workarounds avoiding these merges?

Answer 1

There are three tools that might help you

• Keep history linear by using rebase. This only moves resolving conflicts around, but the idea is that before pushing to repository, or requesting pull from your repository by maintainer, to use git rebase on top of current version. Note: don’t do this on published history. This ensures that the other person doesn’t have to resolve conflicts.

  Tongue in cheek: if you are tired of merging, you can git pull --rebase instead 😉 Though this wouldn’t help you having to resolve conflicts.

• If you find yourself resolving the same conflict again and again, try enabling git rerere — it is tool that reuses recorded resolution of conflicted merges.

  You need to set the configuration variable rerere.enabled in order to enable this command.

• If the standard 3-way text merge does not work for you, but your merge conflicts can be resolved programatically, you can set up merge driver for specified files. See description of merge attribute in the gitattributes manpage.

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Alternate solution is to shift work around.

Instead of first pulling, resolving merges, then pushing to “central” repository, you can ask maintainer to pull changes from you (git request-pull might help here).

If you are maintainer, you can ask developer to either fix his/her changes so that it would merge cleanly (e.g. by rebasing on top of current version), or asking them to merge. They might know better how to resolve conflicts.