[vtk-developers] Preventing conflicts in the new workflow

[David Doria]

A situation came up on the users list today which sparked a
hypothetical question. There was a small issue with a function that
two people agreed should be fixed. I have a topic branch that happens
to deal with that function, so I was planning on adding the fix to the
existing topic. If I hadn't mentioned that I was doing that, person B
may have made their own topic branch just for this fix and merged it
with master. Then when I go to merge my topic when it is finished,
there would likely be a conflict.

With the old "push directly to master" system, you would pull the
latest version (the cvs mindset), then make changes to that. So, as
long as person A and person B don't do this at physically the same
time there won't be a problem. With the new system, person B would
have to know about the branch that person A is working on in order to
check if the fix has already been applied there. Once there are more
than a handful of topic branches, keeping track of who is working on
what will be tricky.

Sorry if this is unclear, but is there a solution to this? Or is it
even actually a problem?

Thanks,

David