Maintain a local git Repository, Even if the rest of your Team does not

When working in a collaborative project where part of your team is either not familiar with Version Control Systems like git or they refuse to use such tools for some reason, it can be a hassle to incorporate changes made by other team members into the copy of files that you are working on.

Maintaining a git repository of the files at your end helps in collaboration even in this case.

I use the following set of branches:

• upstream - upstream changes are added here. This branch's history will reflect just the upstream changes, which is sometimes useful.
• integration/clean - This branch is where I clean and reformat the files received from upstream. Kind of like a merging point of the upstream files and the files I am working with.
• integration/IO - This is the branch that will contain my changes. Name this what you want.
• main - stable branch to contain tagged releases.

When upstream changes are to be merged with your local version, which may have your own changes made locally, you can

1. Add the upstream changes to upstream via copy paste, commit

2. Switch to integration/clean, then merge upstream into the current branch. (I prefer using a --no-ff merge to keep histories separate.)

   • If a merge is messy, you can also replace a file on the current branch with a version from the upstream branch completely without questions using

     git checkout upstream -- <filename>

   • You can also open up a diff for the file you are editing against the same file from a different branch (like integration/IO to refer to your own additions) by using

     git difftool integration/IO -- <filename>

     You can edit the file (the right side would be current branch) in the diff iteself, if using vim, and save it, even if its opened in read-only mode.

     Commit when satified

3. Switch to integration/IO and merge from integration/clean (again, --no-ff for separate histories). You can now add your own changes here.

   Commit when satisfied

4. Switch to main, merge from integration/IO, add a tag.

---

Related:

• 20220119070922 Compare versions of file from Different Branches
• 20220119071757 Replace file with version from another branch

Tags:

#permanent-note #version-control #collaboration #team-work