Does anyone know how to make this "cactus" workflow work better on github?
We use it in our organization and between us we know to always manually rebase before merging. However, when we receive an external PR from someone else it's a pain. It's also easy to accidentally forget to rebase before merging.
You can allow rebase merging [1] while disabling other PR options, and require linear commit history [2] if desired.
[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/admin...
[2]: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/admin...
Thanks, but I don't think that is quite what I want. What I mean by "cactus" history is that the feature branches have a linear history that starts at the tip of the master branch but when we merge them back into master we still use a merge commit. Looks like this:
o-o-o o-o-o o-o
/ \ / \ / \
o-------o-------o-----o
o-o-o--o-o-o--o-oI don't know a way to enforce this, but what may help is knowing that by default, you can push into the PR branch even if it is from someone else's fork: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/colla...
I always go into each new repo I create and turn off the ability to merge and require commits to be up to date with master, I think this might get what you want?
Do you know can I enforce that a PR must be up to date with master before it can be merged? I don't remember seeing that option in the branch protection settings.
"Require branches to be up to date before merging" is a check box under branch protection rules, I always turn it it. It's under the required status checks section.
Thanks! Turns out that this setting is hidden unless you first check the "Require status checks" option.
* It's clear which states master has actually been in, without having to resort to squashing each merge into a single commit. This means that you know which commits actually passed CI and are therefore good rebase targets. People often claim that when merging multiple commits each commit should individually pass CI, but that's almost impossible to achieve in practice.
* Development can split single features into multiple commits for easier review and understanding later. This can be particuarly important if the changes depend on each other, but different people need to review different parts of the overall change. That's another thing that most tooling is really bad at.
* The history is basically linear. The merge commits are all empty, and there is one linear history for all the states of master (the first parent of each merge commit) and one linear history for all the individual commits (the second parent of each merge commit and only parent of each non-merge commit).
Of course this approach isn't well supported by mainstream tooling (e.g. GitHub) and probably requires a custom bot to do all the rebase-and-merge operations. It is pretty well supported by git itself, however.