On our team, we use Git as our source control. We have several areas of code that are almost independent but have some overlap. Lately we have been discussing workflows and approaches to using source control. One complaint that comes up when I promote using a feature branch workflow is that people often run into complicated merge conflicts that they incorrectly resolve. By complicated, I mean "not obvious as to how to resolve". In light of this, other workflows are being more actively used, such a "pull rebase"-based workflow.
As an advocate of the feature branch approach, I'm not really getting the complaint. Yes, you have to keep your local feature branches up-to-date from master or wherever, but that's about the only real problem I see. I'm thinking that if your merges are always complicated and may have secondary effects, then that's more of a teamwork problem than a Git problem.
Am I correct in thinking this? Are complicated merge conflicts a sign of anything good or bad?
Best Answer
It's not impossible that the problem is your code. If your codebase has a lot of inter-relationships between modules, then every change is going to have tendrils everywhere, and every a dev interacts with anyone else's code, it's going to be a nightmare.
I'd tend to think you'd notice this in other ways first, but it's possible that you're so used to it that you can't see it anymore.