https://www.toptal.com/software/trunk-based-development-git-flow
In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Konrad Gadzinowski dissects trunk-based development and Git flow, listing the pros and cons for various use cases.
In order to develop quality software, we need to be able to track all changes and reverse them if necessary. Version control systems fill that role by tracking project history and helping to merge changes made by multiple people. They greatly speed up work and give us the ability to find bugs more easily.
Moreover, working in distributed teams is possible mainly thanks to these tools. They enable several people to work on different parts of a project at the same time and later join their results into a single product. Let’s take a closer look at version control systems and explain how trunk-based development and Git flow came to being.
Before version control systems were created, people relied on manually backing up previous versions of projects. They were copying modified files by hand in order to incorporate the work of multiple developers on the same project.
It cost a lot of time, hard drive space, and money.
When we look at the history, we can broadly distinguish three generations of version control software.
Let’s take a look at them:
We notice that as version control systems mature, there is a tendency to increase the ability to work on projects in parallel.
One of the most groundbreaking changes was a shift from locking files to merging changes instead. It enabled programmers to work more efficiently.
Another considerable improvement was the introduction of distributed systems. Git was one of the first tools to incorporate this philosophy. It literally enabled the open-source world to flourish. Git allows developers to copy the whole repository, in an operation called forking, and introduce the desired changes without needing to worry about merge conflicts.
Later, they can start a pull request in order to merge their changes into the original project. If the initial developer is not interested in incorporating those changes from other repositories, then they can turn them into separate projects on their own. It’s all possible thanks to the fact that there is no concept of central storage.
Nowadays, the most popular version control system is definitely Git, with a market share of about 70 percent in 2016.
Git was popularized with the rise of Linux and the open-source scene in general. GitHub, currently the most popular online storage for public projects, was also a considerable contributor to its prevalence. We owe the introduction of easy to manage pull requests to Git.
Put simply, pull requests are requests created by a software developer to combine changes they created with the main project. It includes a process of reviewing those changes. Reviewers can insert comments on every bit they think could be improved, or see as unnecessary.