Git workflow - Reverting a feature branch from release branch

Question

I'm trying to understand a problem in creating a git-workflow

We're thinking of developing several features at once using feature branches, so lets say we have:

- F1 (Feature 1)
- F2 (Feature 2)
- F3 (Feature 3)

We have just completed features 1 and 3, and merge them into our development branch for integration testing:

-F1---Commit1---Commit2----------------------------------
-F2--------Commit1---------------------------------------
-F3--------------------------Commit1---------------------
-Development-------Merge-F1------------Merge-F2----------

The development branch is bleeding edge and gets released as part of a nightly build. When we're happy with this, this branch is merged into a staging branch, that is then used for client review:

-F1---Commit1---Commit2---------------------------------------------
-F2--------Commit1--------------------------------------------------
-F3-------------------------Commit1-----Commit2---------------------
-Development-------Merge-F1------------Merge-F2---------------------
-Staging-------------------------------------------Merge-Development

The client reviews this release on the test environment, but isn't happy with F1. During this time, F3 is code complete and the client would like to review.

Q - How using git would we get into a position whereby our staging branch has only F2 and F3 for review, but not F1 that the client has now rejected?

Answer 1

You have basically two choices here:

1. revert the F1 merge in Development and then merge that into Staging.
   F1 will vanish from Development and Staging.

2. reset Staging to the commit before merging F1 and merge F2 and F3 by hand.
   You will end up with Staging not being a subset of Development.
   F1 will vanish from Staging only.

Answer 2

We have a very similar flow in our project. The way we work is that we have two environments where we demo our customer:

• Development
• Test

We first deploy from the development branch to the Development environment. The customer tests the features individually in this environment.

Then, we merge to the staging branch only the features that the customer was happy with.

Finally, we deploy the final pre-release version to the Test environment for final review.

In this case we never have to remove a feature but maybe small fixes.