[Off-topic] SCM using git

[amit mehta]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 5:11 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally, in young code I find long lived branches hard to work with.
>
> For new features I prefer to work first on the integration related
> code with a stub that gracefully does nothing or fails.
>
> So at the start of adding a new feature that will be implemented via a
> subroutine,write the invoking code a stub that gracefully does
> nothing.  Often the invoking code and the stub can be written in 10
> minutes or less.
>
> Then push/pull that into master immediately.
>
> Then I would use an ifdef to work on a real subroutine to implement
> the feature.  ie.
>
> #ifndef FEATURE_X_TESTING
> /* Declare a a stub to use until the code is stable enough for master */
> int new_function() {
>      return(TRUE);
> }
> #else
> /* This is unstable code I am still writing */
> int new_function() {
>      /* New code */
> }
> #endif
>
> Then in my local makefile (or via a environment variable, I set
> FEATURE_X_TESTING true.
>
> Now my new unstable code will have no negative impact on master, so I
> push it to master often.  Probably at least once a day.
>
> When I'm ready to first enable it in master, I just define
> FEATURE_X_TESTING in master.
>
This is interesting. However, I personally, don't like these preprocessor
stuff, since a lot of those make it difficult for me to follow the code flow
and we already have quite a few of them and was thinking of getting
rid of as much I can. But, still a big thank you for your suggestion.

- Amit