A monolithic dev branch

At the recent XO Ruby Vancouver event, Ryan Davis (zenspider) gave a talk called “Git Power Tools.”1 I would recommend it to any beginner or intermediate Git user whose team a) collaborates on a large codebase, b) collaborates using a rebase workflow, and c) values atomic commits and the writing of good commit messages.2 Before I get into the most valuable idea I took from Ryan’s presentation, the monolithic dev branch, I want to summarize what, at a macro level, I think makes this talk insightful. A brief summary Ryan walks us through his process for debugging a set of commits. Throughout, he uses an example of a feature branch with a lot of changes: a big upgrade to a web application that needs to be deployed all at once. (It happens.) The process is centered around using git-bisect to locate the first commit that introduces a bug. Then, he uses a variety of Git’s other tooling to split up, reorder, and rewrite commits. The talk includes a link to a repository of aliased Git…

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