Plan Ahead Your Merge
Table of Contents
Plan Ahead Merges for Ongoing Features
Pattern
feature/mergePlan/...
Examples
feature/mergePlan/newFeature
Description
While feature branches are being worked on, frequently perform “plan ahead” merges into the main line to ensure conflicts don’t become overwhelming.
“Plan ahead” branches should be temporary, and removed after the feature is merged into it’s base branch.
Example
Set Up
Create a feature branch: git checkout semver/minor git checkout -b feature/newFeature
After doing some work, multiple commits may be created on feature/newFeature. Time to do a “plan ahead” merge!
First Plan Merge
Checkout the base branch. git checkout semver/minor Create a branch to save the merge. git checkout -b feature/mergePlan/newFeature
Merge the feature. git merge --no-ff feature/newFeature Resolve any conflicts, then complete the merge. git merge --continue
Tip: If your conflicts are easy enough to remember, the following “Additional” and “Final” techniques may be more complex than needed. You can just repeat the “First Plan” method each time you want to check your progress and your final merge can just be a normal merge.
Additional Plan Merges
Update Plan With Feature Changes
As work continues, continue to update your merge plan. To avoid the need to resolve the same conflicts as before, you can use the previous “plan ahead” merge.
git checkout feature/mergePlan/newFeature Merge the feature. git merge --no-ff feature/newFeature
Resolve any conflicts, then complete the merge. git merge --continue
Update Plan With Mainline Changes
There may be changes on the Mainline that you want to include in your merge plan. In this special case for this temporary branch, merge the opposite direction from normal to update the “plan ahead” merge with changes from semver/minor.
git checkout feature/mergePlan/newFeature Merge changes from the mainline. git merge --no-ff semver/minor
Resolve any conflicts, then complete the merge. git merge --continue
Final Merge Into Base
Before the final merge, update the “plan ahead” merge branch with all changes from both feature and mainline. Any changes not merged into your plan will not be included in the final result.
Begin the merge normally. git checkout semver/minor git merge --no-ff feature/newFeature
Now all the conflicts that have accumulated show at once. Use read-tree to get all your resolved files from the “plan ahead” branch. For this to work, a clean index is required, so we’ll just add all our unresolved files (normally don’t do this, we’re about to overwrite them). git add --all
Run the following read-tree command. The -u argument stands for “update”, and causes the new files to also be written to your worktree (the default is to only write them to the index). The -m argument stands for “merge” and is required, but because we only specified one tree no merging actually occurs. git read-tree -u -m feature/newFeature
Confirm that all files contain your resolutions and are added to the index, then complete the merge. git merge --continue
Delete the “plan ahead” branch. git branch -D feature/mergePlan/newFeature
Multiple Feature Branches
Don’t cross merges. Decide which will be released first and rebase the second onto it’s latest “plan ahead” merge. If the release order changes, the conflicts resolutions will need to be redone.