Recommended Eclipse EGit workflow

Question

Group,

We use Borland Starteam as our source control system. I develop Java code and use Eclipse as my IDE. I recently started using EGit as my personal source control system and came up with the following workflow to streamline my dev work, which consists of checking out code, adding features, fixing bugs, testing, merging with the parent source in Star team (huge effort if lots of people have made changes in the meanwhile), build, test, and install. I want to use EGit to simplify the compile, merge and test process, while developing and also just before code install after big merges are made. This is what I have come up with.

1. Create file system folders - 'Master' and 'Work'
2. Check out fresh source folder structure from Starteam into 'Work'.
3. Create Eclipse workspace called 'Work' and import Eclipse projects from 'Work' folder add those projects to an EGit repository.
4. Add features/fix bugs while in 'Work' workspace. Test, etc. Create a patch when ready to install. Now its time to make the big merge, rebuild, test again.
5. Check out fresh source from Starteam on the day of the install into 'Master' folder in the file system.
6. Create Eclipse workspace 'Master' from source in 'Master' folder, import Eclipse projects and add those to a newly created EGit repository.
7. Import patch into 'Master' workspace, perform merge. Fix compile errors, test, etc.
8. Install.

Is this workflow efficient? Are there more advanced features in EGit that would simply this any further?

Thanks for any guidance. Ranjit

Answer 1

Unless I'm understanding this wrong, it looks like you are using eclipse workspaces in place of the existing git branch functionality. Egit, if I'm correct, can manage branches all on its own so you don't need to run back and forth switching workspaces. You can create then merge branches and do all the other fun stuff within a single project.

The workflow from here is all git. A good article on maintaining a sane workflow can be found here: http://sandofsky.com/blog/git-workflow.html