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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

Likewise.

I never got GitHub's PR model. Maintaining separate branches of a single codebase is something I want to do approximately never, and a single commit is the right atom for code review.

Thus, I find Phabricator to be intuitive in a way that branch-based workflows never were.

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When we develop software task by task, feature by feature, some (actually, most) features are too big to be represented by a single commit. This is because we need code versions history to understand those changes in the future, even if the author is not around, and wrapping my head around +5000/-3000 diff is very complex task by itself. On the other hand, in most CD systems pushing commit to master branch triggers a new version deploy. So we are doing small atomic "always green" changes in a separate branch, and then merge them all at once into master branch.

Has your team considered using feature flags? For large changes that can span weeks of effort, being able to PR and get small portions in to main branch and then "flip the switch" at the end usually works out better for us than "okay our feature branch is done but now we have to catch it back up to everything that happened in the meantime from the past few weeks."

We are thinking about it. There are still some gray zones like database migrations. It is easier to daily rebase big feature branches onto master, IMO.

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