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avgcorrection | 2 years ago

The first big thread on GitButler (recent) left me scratching my head. All the material with jargon like “virtual branches” just left me confused. It was like jumping into a how-to on why choose a Ferrari without first understanding what a car is. This clears things up nicely.

I mostly use worktrees for very separate things. Like: long-running build, way old or way new versions of the app. Then it doesn’t make sense to mix-and-match virtual branches. So when I want to build the app for deployment I don’t want to worry about whatever other changes getting in the way. Git worktrees doesn’t solve the same problem as what GitButler does. Worktrees is a streamlined way of the manual separate-clone workflow for the same repository. (Technically they are all distinct repositories once you clone them but ya know.)

I do have use for separate-from-branch files. Like notes to myself and test scripts that aren’t going into the branch. Crucially these files have nothing to do with the main work: the files themselves are not involved, so there can never be merge conflicts.

This GitButler workflow makes sense for things that (1) won’t cause merge conflicts and (2) which won’t step on each others’ toes. The example about a translation and code change is nice. Doing a translation at the same time as a code change is not likely to “break the build”.

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