GITHUB branching process - down-merge and up-merge

Question

I need some clarification on the GITHUB. Let suppose we have below branch structure.

• Dev-2 has completed their task and have merged to Development.
• They first up-merged from Dec-2.1 and Dev-2.2 to Dev-2.

• Later they down-merged from Development to Dev-2, and finally up-merge from Dev-2 to Development.

  1. My question is, can Dev-2.1 and Dev-2.2 continue working on their branch without down-merge from Dev-2.
  2. Our plan is, we will up-merge again from Dev-2.1 and Dev-2.2 to Dev-2, whenever required... and later on Dev-2 down-merge from Development and up-merge to Development. is this the correct process??

Answer 1

There is no technical obstacle which would prevent this, but you might get nasty merge conflicts if the changes of Dev-2.x are conflicting with changes on develop.

In general it's a better workflow to merge in the changes from develop regularly into your individual working branches to make sure your changes still integrate nicely. In this way conflicts can be resolved early or even completely avoided because the work isn't based on an outdated source.

Of course this also depends on the nature of your project and how work is split up. If all changes are orthogonal then merge conflicts shouldn't be an issue.