Gitflow feature vs bugfix branch naming

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Pavel Chernikov picture Pavel Chernikov · Jun 29, 2015 · Viewed 50.4k times · Source

While using Gitflow, what is the reason for separating branch naming to feature vs bugfix vs hotfix?

I.e. why not just, for example, instead of:

feature/
bugfix/
hotfix/

Just do:

change/

What does separating by feature/bugfix/hotfix buy?

Answer

Dominik picture Dominik · Jun 30, 2015

Great questions and the answer really depends on how you sort your git. The branching model and gitflow in general is trying to give us some order in the chaos that commits are just after a couple of days.

The image below shows you what they though makes most sense.

(As far as I know it all came from this blog post by Vincent Driessen)

Separating your hotfixes which merge directly into master and your bugfixes which merge into dev makes it easier to go with your product cycle.

The idea is you build your app, create features, make a release candidate (beta test) and then release your app. Hotfixs can be necessary at any time after this. No point in going back all the way to the feature branch and issuing a bug fix there as the feature may already been developed further.

Does that make sense?

enter image description here

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