[chociej]

I don't think either of those is necessarily true. I don't ever need to merge long lived branches if I don't want to. And I definitely don't ever merge my production branches with... anything. They are always just a fast-forward from another branch.

[umvi]

In my case I have 2 branches - production and development which map to different cloud environments. Pushing to development branch will run CI/CD to auto-deploy to development cloud, and pushing to production will run CI/CD to auto-deploy to production cloud. This particular software is also classified as a medical device under FDA which means there are regulations about what can be deployed to production and when. Hence, I cannot just fast forward production from another branch without first getting FDA approval. I can, however, cherry pick certain kinds of bug fixes into production without FDA approval, and then later (after FDA approval) merge the other approved changes into production as well. In this case fast forwarding isn't possible because of the cherry picks so we are using just normal merge commits.

Do you have a better git workflow in mind than what is described above?