Keeping Git branches up to date while waiting for them to be merged into upstream

Question

I forked a GitHub project, implemented a few features and fixed a few bugs in separate branches, sending pull requests for all of them.

While waiting for them to be accepted into upstream, I want to use all these features and fixes. For that, I create a branch 'my-master', from 'upstream/master' and merge all changes from other branches which are not yet in upstream. I also write a list of applied patches into the README.md.

When one of my patches goes to upstream, there is no reason to keep that branch any more, so I delete it.

It works, BUT, here there is a problem with such approach:

From time to time, I need to rebase all my unaccepted branches, to keep them up to date. After that, I have to recreate 'my-master' branch and update its README.md again.

Is there a way I can speed up or automate this?

Please, don't advise me to try git-up. It is useful, but does a different thing.

Answer 1

One technique is to rebase your branch onto the upstream each time there is a release. You may want to create a tag at the old branch tip, or a dated-versioned branch name so that you don't lose your old history after garbage collection.

Or you may want to use the merging rebase script that msysgit uses https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/blob/master/share/msysGit/merging-rebase.sh, which creates the impression of a continuous line of development (via the second parent) that is equivalent to the above rebasing processes.

In both cases you retain a set of commits that you were happy with should your rebase fixes (from conflicts) end up being problematic.

This covers two problems:

1. upstream is slow to update (relative to the speed you want/need)
2. upstream is targeted at a different 'platform' and you'll always need fixes 'on top' for your platform/purpose.