gitgit-flowhotfix

purpose of git hotfix branch

gitflow

CMIIW, the famous git-flow workflow above suggests the step for conducting a hotfix is as followed: stable branch: 'master' working branch: 'develop'

  1. branch 'hotfix' out from 'master'
  2. fix and commit to 'hotfix'
  3. merge 'hotfix' into 'master'
  4. merge 'hotfix' into 'develop'
  5. del 'hotfix'

My question is why do we need to create a 'hotfix' branch? What would be the [harm/drawback/lack of flexibilities] if we do this

  1. checkout 'master'
  2. fix and commit to 'master' and call the commit like "DEBUG: some fix"
  3. merge 'master' into 'develop'

My guessing is that 'hotfix' branch is trying to follow the same paradigm as 'feature branch', where we don't directly commit to 'develop' and 'master'. But the 'hotfix' branch generally requires only little code changes in my case (eg. getting rid of an extra comma that causing SQL error), which I personally don't find it worse the effort of creating a new branch.

If both ways are fine, how do I judge when to use what? Based on the amount of fixes?

If my proposed way is not good, could you specify what issues it could potentially cause or what flexibilities it doesn't provide compared to the standard way?

Solution

  • master/ (or now main) is supposed to reflect what is running in production at any time.

    And when you are doing commits on an hotfix branch, you need to test/validate those commits do fix the bug.
    Only once the validation steps have been done can you merge to master/main.
    And possible to develop (although you can have a bug in production which is no longer relevant in develop, because of new features which render said bug moot)

    The goal is also to avoid any merge from master/main. You merge to it, not from it, in order to keep any possible merge conflict limited.
    Plus, merge are done with --no-ff (no fast-forward), as discussed in petervanderdoes/gitflow-avh issue 257: the goal is to clearly see from which hotfix branch the development commit created by the merge comes from (instead of just coming from "master/main").
    Again, not all bugfix publish to master applies completely to develop anyway.