git: how do I merge between branches while keeping some changesets exclusive to one branch?

Question

There\'s a special place in hell for people who hardcode absolute paths and database credentials into multiple random places in web applications. Sadly, before they go to he

Answer 1

Personally, if I had to do something like this and was for whatever reason prevented from refactoring credentials as I go, I'd add two more branches, ending up with an arrangement similar to the following:

master: the original code you inherited

localcred: branch from master, and add just the one patch that changes all the credentials to what you need locally. Treat this branch as read-only hereafter (and possibly add a hook to prevent accidental commits).

feature: branch from master, and all fixes go here (and possibly add a hook to prevent merging with the patch in localcred)

local: a branch (not a tag!) that will start out as a branch of localcred, and then merge feature whenever you need to run your unit tests. All testing happens from here, but no development happens here. In addition, this branch is disposable, because you might want to rebase inside of feature, and the fastest way to deal with the result will be to delete branch local, branch it again from localcred and merge feature before running your tests. This is likely to be a common enough operation in my workflow that I'd build an alias to do it repeatedly in just a few keystrokes, but I work the hell out of the disposability of Git branches, which kind of freaks out some people who watch me, so YMMV.

When you think your fixes are ready for publication, you do your final rebase of feature to clean up the history, dump and recreate local for your final test, merge feature into master, and once that's accepted upstream, merge master into localcred and rebase your credential patch to the top, then dump and recreate local and feature and play the game all over again.

If you want to rapidly test a large set of tiny variations of code without having to commit and merge each time, checkout local, make your changes until you're happy, commit, and immediately cherry-pick from local into feature, then drop and recreate local.

Does that satisfy your needs?