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A comment on Branchless development. Parent comment

Re:Branchless development by zeendo on Sunday July 19, 2015 @01:27PM (#9911955)
Of course we still have merge conflicts. You do too. Or is your work just organized such that no two people are ever working on the same file concurrently? If it is then you'd not have any merge conflicts with trunk based development either.

Fundamentally merge conflicts are unavoidable.

The claim by the trunk based development crowd is that smaller, but more frequent merge conflicts produce fewer mistakes. Trunk based development leads to smaller merges because you do them more frequently. That's about it.

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Re:Branchless development by spinningarrow on Monday July 20, 2015 @02:33AM (#9914305)
Working on the same file concurrently does not guarantee conflicts - working on the same code does.

We recently switched to short-lived feature branches (short-lived as in a couple of days maximum), and I haven't had to resolve merge conflicts in months. Our feature branches previously used to last around two weeks and merging things in was collectively not looked forward to. Now I don't even have to give it a second thought.

tl;dr not having merge conflicts is an entirely possible happy reality.

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Re:Branchless development by zeendo on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @08:02AM (#9921607)
Sure. My point is that avoiding merge conflicts has nothing to do with your branching strategy...it has to do with what work you parallelize.
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