Re: merge into branch currently not active / checked out

[Thomas Glanzmann <thomas@glanzmann.de>]

Hi Junio,

> If you plan to eventually ask somebody who integrates the 'master' to
> pull from you, and keep the resulting development history clean, (1)
> is _NOT_ a good reason to merge 'master' into your topics.  Because
> after your topic finally is finished, when 'master' pulls it, it will
> see many "senseless" merges from itself.

the problem is. Getting a patch into mutt takes several years. At least
it took for the hcache. So what I do is keep my patches up2date on top
of there HEAD. So I prefer topic branches. And my patches throw _once_
in 4 years a conflict that was not automatically resolved. I used
bitkeeper before, now I use git.

> Such "an integration testing" is better done, instead, by forking a
> 'test' (perhaps throw-away) branch from 'master', and merging all your
> topics into it.

I dislike it myself.

> Also, if you do not publish your work-in-progress topics, you
> might want to consider rebasing on top of 'master', instead of
> 'merging'.  Rebase can take the topic branch name and switch
> your current branch for you when you give it, like so:

I don't push my work other than in patches that is, so I am going to
give it a try. I always wanted to try rebase, but I never actually did
try it.

Thanks,
        Thomas