Productivity with git worktree

productivity.md

Productivity

Developers work with many branches at the same time because during any single day they review others' pull requests, try new crazy things, work on new features/bug-fixes and also fix somebody else's PRs. All this forces a combination of git stash [pop|save], git fetch, git checkout [-f] and again git stash [pop|apply]. No matter if this is done by command line or with a tool the problem of having only one copy of the code is an ugly constrain.

Wasabi Wallet folders organization (suggestion)

Create main local bare repository

First clone your existing repository as a bare repo (a repository without files) and do it in a .git directory.

$ git clone --bare git@github.com:zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi.git .git

Working with remote repositories

There are two non-mutually exclusive alternatives here. One is to work with the other developers' repositories directy or work with the origin repository only.

Work with devs remote repositories (alternative 1)

Having the team members' repositories as remote makes the work easier:

$ git remote add dan git@github.com:danwalmsley/WalletWasabi.git
$ git remote add jmacato git@github.com:jmacato/WalletWasabi.git
$ git remote add kiminuo git@github.com:kiminuo/WalletWasabi.git
$ git remote add max git@github.com:MaxHillebrand/WalletWasabi.git
$ git remote add molnard git@github.com:molnard/WalletWasabi.git
$ git remote add nopara73 git@github.com:nopara73/WalletWasabi.git
$ git remote add yahia git@github.com:yahiheb/WalletWasabi.git
$ git remote add yuval git@github.com:nothingmuch/WalletWasabi.git

Once we have all the remote repositories we fetch them all (this can be a bit slow but it takes time only the first time)

$ git fetch --all

After that we have absolutely everything locally.

Work with origin remote repository only (alternative 2)

Edit the .git/config file and add this line in the origin repository section

fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/*

Once we have this fetch the repo:

$ git fetch origin

Folders organization

The suggestion is to have our master branch in its own folder.

$ git worktree add master

For each team member we can have a dedicated folder in the team folder and then, imagine you need to review two PRs, one from Yahia and other from Kiminuo, depending on how you decided to config your repositories it is enough to do:

With developers remote repositories:

$ git worktree add kiminuo/pr-1234 kiminuo/feature/2021-01-Tor-exceptions-2nd
$ git worktree add yahia/pr-2534 yahia/bitcoind-tor-hashes

With origin only remote repository:

$ git worktree add kiminuo/pr-1234 origin/pr/1234
$ git worktree add yahia/pr-2534 origin/pr/2534

Bellow you can see what you got after the previous commands. In this way it is possible to simply switch from PR to PR and from branch to branch as easy as simply cd.

We can go to the Kiminuo's tor-exceptions branch and work there, add files, review the changes, compile it and test it and we can immediately jump to the Yahia's bitcoind-tor-hashes branch, perform a git pull to have the latest changes and review it.

├── master
│   ├── WalletWasabi
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Backend
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Documentation
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent.Desktop
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent.Generators
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Gui
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Packager
│   ├── WalletWasabi.Tests
│   └── WalletWasabi.WindowsInstaller
└── pr
    ├── kiminuo
    │   └── pr-1234
    │       ├── WalletWasabi
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Backend
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Documentation
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent.Desktop
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent.Generators
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Gui
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Packager
    │       ├── WalletWasabi.Tests
    │       └── WalletWasabi.WindowsInstaller
    └── yahia
        └── pr-2534
            ├── team
            ├── WalletWasabi
            ├── WalletWasabi.Backend
            ├── WalletWasabi.Documentation
            ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent
            ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent.Desktop
            ├── WalletWasabi.Fluent.Generators
            ├── WalletWasabi.Gui
            ├── WalletWasabi.Packager
            ├── WalletWasabi.Tests
            └── WalletWasabi.WindowsInstaller

This is also useful for testing bugs in released versions. Imagine you are working in the middle of some refactoring for a new feature and someone reports a bug in v1.1.12.2. In that case you don't need to stash nor commit anything, instead you can simply do:

$ git worktree add releases/v1.1.12.2 v1.1.12.2
$ cd releases/v1.1.12.2