git pull or git merge between master and development branches

Question

I have my master branch and a develop branch for working on a few changes  I need to merge changes from master into develop  but will eventually merge everything from develop into master  I  have two different workflows in mind    git pull origin master into develop branch git merge master into develop branch   Which is the best way to do this  and why

User · Answer

If you are not sharing develop branch with anybody, then I would just rebase it every time master updated, that way you will not have merge commits all over your history once you will merge develop back into master. Workflow in this case would be as follows:

> git clone git://<remote_repo_path>/ <local_repo>
> cd <local_repo>
> git checkout -b develop
....do a lot of work on develop
....do all the commits
> git pull origin master
> git rebase master develop

Above steps will ensure that your develop branch will be always on top of the latest changes from the master branch. Once you are done with develop branch and it's rebased to the latest changes on master you can just merge it back:

> git checkout -b master
> git merge develop
> git branch -d develop

User · Answer

This workflow works best for me   git checkout -b develop      make some changes        notice master has been updated        commit changes to develop     git checkout master git pull      bring those changes back into develop     git checkout develop git rebase master      make some more changes        commit them to develop        merge them into master     git checkout master git pull git merge develop

User · Answer

Be careful with rebase  If you re sharing your develop branch with anybody  rebase can make a mess of things  Rebase is good only for your own local branches   Rule of thumb  if you ve pushed the branch to origin  don t use rebase  Instead  use merge

User · Answer

The best approach for this sort of thing is probably git rebase   It allows you to pull changes from master into your development branch  but leave all of your development work  on top of   later in the commit log  the stuff from master   When your new work is complete  the merge back to master is then very straightforward

User · Answer

my rule of thumb is      rebase for branches with the same name  merge otherwise    examples for same names would be master  origin master and otherRemote master   if develop exists only in the local repository  and it is always based on a recent origin master commit  you should call it master  and work there directly  it simplifies your life  and presents things as they actually are  you are directly developing on the master branch   if develop is shared  it should not be rebased on master  just merged back into it with --no-ff  you are developing on develop  master and develop have different names  because we want them to be different things  and stay separate  do not make them same with rebase

[git] "git pull" or "git merge" between master and development branches

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