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by RHSeeger 2521 days ago
> What do you do when you have a branch working on Android and another branch working on iOS and you have deliveries on both platforms? You postpone the merge, and keep the fork.

Honestly, it never occurred to me that you're deploy from more than one branch. If you can't merge the branches into <your main branch that releases are built from>, then what's in the branch doesn't make it into a release (from my experience).

2 comments

Seriously, this part threw me hard. Having multiple active forks is not something that's ever been considered as an option anywhere I've worked. Worse, I'm not convinced multi-repo even fixes this issue if you already have a culture that allows multiple active forks.

For instance, big app rewrite, half-new REST API on the backend. Oh, but we need to maintain the old app APIs for those who can't update (like SuperImportantCustomer). Better fork!

I suppose it depends on your definition of "active" here but having release branches for previous major versions that are still supported with things like backported security fixes etc. is a pretty common setup.
> Honestly, it never occurred to me that you're deploy from more than one branch.

Release branches! Deploy 1.1 from the 1.x branch on the same day you deploy 2.2 from the 2.x branch. 1.x merges into 2.x which merged into master.