Devoted reader Kevin Barnes of OGC pointed out in a comment to my last post that people make mistakes. This is news to me. In consideration of this, we have decided that it is important to test between hacking and shipping to ensure that any merging that goes on doesn’t result in a broken build due to other people’s mistakes.
When multiple teams are working on a project, two teams can commit mutually incompatible changes. These changes may be in different areas and may not cause actual merge conflicts but may still break the build. Git is dumb. It won’t fix these for you. This is why it’s important to run your tests after you merge.
I have thus updated the hack and ship protocol to include this important new step.
Running one last test before you merge your changes into master will also be a final catch-all and allow you to fix any problems before merging back to master. You can even git commit --amend them to prevent anyone else from seeing your own mistakes.
NB: hack && ship won’t ship if there are merge conflicts in the hack step. hack returns a non-zero exit code and the && prevents ship from running. Likewise, hack && test && ship won’t ship unless hack and test are both successful.
Thanks, Kevin.
