Difference with merging?

Question

I have a project with two branches, one is master, and another is develop.

I am always on the master branch and when developers push their changes to develop branch I do git pull origin develop, and then git push origin master. That way I keep those branches up to date.

Another colleague of mine suggested I should do git merge origin develop, but I don't know what would be the difference between my way and his way since we both get the same result in the end.

Anyone with experience can weigh in and explain it to me?

Thank you!

Answer 1

My understanding is that you are acting as a kind of gatekeeper. There are two long-lived branches, master and develop. Development takes place on develop; nothing happens on master except that every so often you merge develop into master.

Since your server doesn't do pull requests, then what you are doing is fine:

git switch master
git pull origin develop
git push origin master

You friend who says to do git merge origin develop probably doesn't say that. It makes no sense.

Your friend probably actually says or means git merge origin/develop. That's a good thing to say, but it omits a step: get fetch.

So you could instead proceed like this:

git fetch
git switch master
git merge origin/develop
git push origin master

From one point of view, that would not gain you anything you don't already have, because pull is the same as fetch followed by merge of the named branch. However, I agree with your colleague: I like it better, because after the fetch you can look at origin/develop and think what's about to happen.

In my opinion, it is best to have a merge commit when you merge from develop to master, to clarify the history. To ensure that, I would recommend saying --no-ff as you pull or merge.

Answer 2

Doing a git pull is actually a composite operation. Doing git pull origin develop means one of the following two things:

git fetch origin + git merge origin/develop   (merge strategy)
- or -
git fetch origin + git rebase origin/develop  (rebase strategy)

If your pull strategy already be set to merge, which is usually the default setting, then you are already doing a merge with origin/develop under the hood when you do your git pull origin develop.