I've done a few pull requests on GH already, but I committed to the master branch. Now I read on various places that it's a good idea to create a branch.
Are there any guidelines for branch naming? I usually work with Mercurial and give my branches the same name as their relevant bug ticket ID, but that doesn't work for this.
I've looked at a few repositories: some commit to master, some commit to fix-somebug, some commit to patch-1. I understand that this doesn't create conflicts, because pull requests are merged to master (or a different, long living branch) and the branch is then deleted, is that correct?
The idea behind a branch for a pull request is to allow for said branch to be automatically deleted once the pull request is accepted.
And since April 2013, that branch will be deleted for you:
You are then suppose to update/rebase your master from the master of the upstream repo in order to get what you developed in isolation a branch from the official repo that you have forked (since that repo has accepted your pull request)
The name of the branch should represent the development effort you are engaged in.
It is always a good practise to make commit on the git branches rather than master. You can use any name for your git branch(it doesn't allow spaces in branch names, also some special characters).
Related
Can we create pull request from master branch to master branch in Azure devops because our team will work on directly in master branch and we need to code review and approval method also.
No this isn't how git works. You would have to branch off of master and then PR these branches back into master. Committing directly to master is not a recommended practice
Contributions to a source code repository that uses a distributed version control system are commonly made by means of a pull request, also known as a merge request.
The contributor requests that the project maintainer pulls the source code change, hence the name "pull request". The maintainer has to merge the pull request if the contribution should become part of the source base.
A pull request can be accepted or rejected by maintainers. Once the pull request is reviewed and approved, it is merged into the repository.
The above is how to pull request works.
We can push empty commits via git commit --allow-empty -m 1, But for your situation, even no empty commits(Because the source branch and target branch always the same), so of course the pull request will not be able to created.
Another thing will clearly tell you the reason:
If you use this API to create Pull Request from 'master' to 'master', you will find it is not accepted.
The detection of whether the 'sourcebranch' and 'targetbranch' are the same is high priority, even before the detection of the existence of the branch, so what you want to achieve is not possible from the basic of the design.
In my git repository I have three branches: master: default, dev: compare, and temp.
When I create a Pull Request from temp branch it defaults to dev as the target.
It is in contradiction with what Microsoft documentation says:
Change the default branch used to merge code into when your team
creates new pull requests. This is useful when you want to use a
branch other than master for the main line of development in your
repo.
Am I missing something?
For default branch, it helps you to treat the branch as default when cloning the git repo locally or creating a PR.
Such as if you treat master branch as default branch (by default), when you cloned the git repo locally, the local branch is master. And when you creating a PR, it will automatically treat master branch as the target branch.
For compare branch, it helps you to decide how many commits on the other branches are behind or ahead by comparing commits on other branches with the compare branch.
Such as for above example, develop branch is compare branch, and master branch and nn1 branch are compare with develop branch.
For comparing master branch with develop branch, there has 0 commits behind and 0 commit ahead (master branch same as develop branch). For comparing nn1 branch with develop branch, there are 3 commits behind and 48 commits ahead.
I did some quick tests in my VSTS tenant. It looks like the default branch of a new pull request is always the Compare branch, rather than the Default branch. So if you set your master branch as Compare branch, it should become to the default for new pull requests.
Not sure if it is bug of VSTS, or if they change the behavior of pull request without updating the doc.
Update:
I did some further research. It turned out that this change was introduced in a Oct 2016 feature roll out:
You can now set your compare branch to something other than the
default branch. This setting will be remembered on a per-user basis.
Pull requests and new branches created from the Branches page will be
based off the branch you set as the compare branch.
So the doc needs to be updated.
Can anyone explain why a commit in GitHub would display the following information : 'Contributor-A' committed with 'Contributor-B' on 15 Feb.
Does it mean that 'Contributor-A' is the author (who does not have the push access to the master) and 'Contributor-B' is the committer/maintainer?
Then why isn't there a PR created for merging this commit? Or does it mean that there was a closed PR about this commit, but the maintainer did not merge it via web interface but performed rebase or cherry-picking to include it?
Many thanks!
...maintainer did not merge it via web interface but performed rebase or cherry-picking to include it?
I was able to get this by cherry-picking a commit from another branch and directly pushing to the current branch - an example on GitHub.
A Pull Request is not required to push code between branches. A Pull Request is a method that allows developers to collaborate on changes prior to merging between branches.
For sure, it happens when the pull request was merged by "Rebase and Merge" strategy via the web interface, but I'm not sure if this is the unique case.
Contributor-A committed with Contributor-B on 15 Feb.
Contributor-A submitted the pull request and Contributor-B effectively merged it.
It might happen in other scenarios as described here: how to apply a git patch as if the author committed to my repo?
I have 2 branches in my github repository. How do I enforce a branch policy for Master branch such that any changes to it must require a code review from specific folks done ?
This is best managed by repos, not branches.
You can have one repo with the master branch, and one or several forks, from which developers can make pull request in order to request a merge to master of the original repo.
Only the "specific folks" are declared collaborators on the original repo, and can review the PRs and merge them.
Then the developers can synchronize their own fork.
I have 2 branches - master and develop
I have been doing some pull requests in my develop branch where it contains 5 items, in which it is the same as the number of items in master.
However, someone did some commits and pushed in a few more items into the master branch, and hence now it has 8 items.
As my pull request in the develop is still not yet approved/merged, whenever I tried to update my pull request, I am getting the message stating that This pull request can't be merged. You will need to resolve conflicts to be able to merge and asked me to do the following:
git fetch origin master
git checkout develop
git merge FETCH_HEAD
git commit
git push origin HEAD
And this happens after I have 'pushed' out my commits, making me confused at times. Then I realized that it is asking me to re-add and re-commit in the additional 3 new items. So does this means I must ensure that the items and contents between these 2 branches of mine should be the same as always? I have always used git pull/fetch but will there be a better way for me to make sure?
What this means is that GitHub would like to merge your PR branch into master, but it can't, because there are conflicts. As you've discussed in the question comments, the best way to deal with this (usually) is to merge your master branch into develop on the command line. That will show you the conflicts and ask you to resolve them. Once you've completed and pushed that merge, the PR will be mergeable back into master using the green button on GitHub.
You could simply merge your deploy branch into master (which I realize sounds a bit more sensible). In that case, you'd be bypassing the PR entirely. You'd have to close the PR "unmerged", and separately you'd manually push the merge commit to master.
By doing it the first way,
you make a better audit trail by merging to master on GitHub, using the PR;
you give your team a chance to review your code after the merge, before it lands on master; and
if you have automatic tests (such as Travis CI or CircleCI) which check PRs, you give them a chance to run your merged code as well.