This document provides details on ACME development conventions and practices.
...
important -- Items colored in red mean they are important, and should not be ignored.
one time -- Items colored in green are commands to be issued once per machine.
repo once -- Items colored in orange are commands to be issued once per local repository.
...
Your PR is not finished until it has been merged to master by the Integrator.
This document can be used to help with pull request related issues.
...
Before communicating with remotes, you might want to add or remove remotes. In order to add and remove remotes the git remote command can be used. The two uses are as follows:
git remote add remote-name protocol:address/to/repo # Creates a remote
git remote remove remote-name # Removes a remote
In order to communicate with remotes, there are three actions. push, pull, and fetch.
...
You never need to "merge from master" to make the eventual merge of your feature branch easier. This is because, unlike svn, git is smart enough to ignore changes that have occurred in files you aren't working on when you finally merge your branch to master.
This policy is to make it easier on developers - developers dont have to concern themselves with what a hundred other things going on in ACME and can focus solely on their feature. The integrator will evaluate how this feature works with the latest version of ACME when they merge the feature to 'next', before it is merged to 'master'. We also don't want unnecessary merges from upstream since they just clutter and confuse the repository history and provide more opportunity to break things in the branch. However, there are cases where merging from master (or better, an upstream release) can make sense - such as a long lived development branch. The rule of thumb for any merge is that if you can clearly describe what you are merging and why that merge is necessary for your branch to be completed (so that it can be merged upstream), then it's fine to merge. But merges without such justification are generally undesirable. (See discussion here )
Details:
One of the main differences between git and svn is how history and branches are stored. In svn branches are virtual directories (i.e. svn copy ^/trunk branch_name) and the history is stored as a stack of revisions (providing the monotonically increasing revision number). The problem with this is that a branch isn't actually a branch. It doesn't contain the information about where it was created from or what has been "merged" into it. The same is true when a branch is merged back into trunk; there isn't a clear historical description of what has already been integrated into trunk. (NOTE: svn has put some effort into improving their branching and merging capabilities, but they are still not up-to-par with DVCS tools)
...