Post #2695910
2026-04-17 18:12 UTC
@isaiah@mastodon.social I‘m late to this party, but for me the answer to all of these is “it depends.”
For one, it depends on the project & its processes. It also depends on the scope of the change and my overall involvement.
I’ll usually create a branch if I know I’ll need to submit a PR/email patch (FOSS or team); I’ll also create a branch if I anticipate working on a feature over an extended period of time and expect to switch away from that work, e.g. for a bug; or that happens organically.
Replies (1)
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@pmdj@mstdn.social 2026-04-17 18:20
@isaiah@mastodon.social I usually switch between branches within one directory, but sometimes that is impractical. For example, when I was doing major work on QEMU, I’d have one checkout for the big feature and another for smaller things. A switch would usually trigger a significant rebuild, which took an annoyingly long time. For me, branches stay around for as long as they are unique. If its HEAD is just a commit that’s an ancestor of another branch, it can be deleted or replaced by a tag.