Hey, if there are any folks here involved in friendly forks of fediverse software - Do you use any fancy merge strategies to merge upstream changes into your fork? What’s your mileage?
I’ve been hacking away at a private lil fork of Pleroma, adding some little convenience features for myself, and thought it might be a good idea to ask if I should be doing any of the fancy stuff github describes in their article about friendly fork management, or if I’ll be alright just doing git merge upstream/develop :^)
Oh gotcha! Yeah,
git merge upstreamNane branchNameis the right method. Just be aware that you might have a whole host of conflicts to resolve if there’s been a significant amount of time in your branch.One thing I like doing is creating a feature branch, then branching off that for very specific feature work. Then I try to complete that feature quickly and merge that into my feature branch and keep that up to date every day with the updated branch it was forked from. That way, I’m never too far behind production changes and the merge conflicts are kept at a minimum.
You need rebase instead. Merge just creates useless commits and makes the diffs harder to comprehend (all changes are shown at once, but with rebase you fix the conflicts in the commit where they happened)
Then instead of your branch of branch strat you just rebase daily into main and you’re golden when it comes time to PR
This 100%
Yep yep, that’s what I do for my feature branches! ;)
Or, well, at least when I’m the only one working on them, anyway~
Oh haha, I really doubt I need to worry about that; these are pretty community-specific features, I doubt the upstream project would even want them. I am concerned only with keeping my fork’s main development branch up to date with the upstream’s. Y’know, after I merge my custom features into it. There seem to be a bunch of intricate ways to do it (see the blogpost I linked), and I’m unsure if I should care about any of those, or if I can get away with just, doing a normal merge.
I’ve considered this, but my branches don’t generally live longer than a week and there isn’t usually multiple engineers working on a codebase at once. Thankfully my team is smallish and the projects are either small maintenance items or greenfield. I’ll look into where we can leverage it though!