What I don't understand is how they accomplish larger collaborative changes. The paper says:
"Almost all development occurs at the 'head' of the repository, not on branches."
Googler Rachel Potvin made an even stronger statement in her presentation about "The Motivation for a Monolithic Codebase" [1]:
"Branching for development at Google is exceedingly rare [..]"
In the related ACM paper she published with Josh Levenberg there is the statement that:
"Development on branches is unusual and not well supported at Google, though branches are typically used for releases."
I my world when we have to make a bigger change we create a branch and only merge it into the trunk when it is good enough to be
integrated. The branch enables us to work on that change together.
I don't understand how they do this at google. As far as I understand in their model they either have to
- give up on collaboration and always have just a single developer work on a change.
- share code by other means.
- check in unfinished work to the trunk for collaboration and constantly break trunk.
[1] https://youtu.be/W71BTkUbdqE?t=904
[2] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...
"Almost all development occurs at the 'head' of the repository, not on branches."
Googler Rachel Potvin made an even stronger statement in her presentation about "The Motivation for a Monolithic Codebase" [1]:
"Branching for development at Google is exceedingly rare [..]"
In the related ACM paper she published with Josh Levenberg there is the statement that:
"Development on branches is unusual and not well supported at Google, though branches are typically used for releases."
I my world when we have to make a bigger change we create a branch and only merge it into the trunk when it is good enough to be integrated. The branch enables us to work on that change together. I don't understand how they do this at google. As far as I understand in their model they either have to
- give up on collaboration and always have just a single developer work on a change.
- share code by other means.
- check in unfinished work to the trunk for collaboration and constantly break trunk.
[1] https://youtu.be/W71BTkUbdqE?t=904
[2] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...