alt Hacker News> including "no development branches"
Can you explain this comment? Are you saying to develop directly in the main branch?
How do you manage the various time scales and complexity scales of changes? Task/project length can vary from hours to years and dependencies can range from single systems to many different systems, internal and external.
Yeah, all new commits are merged to main.
The complexity comes from releases. Suppose you have a good commit 123 were all your tests pass for some project, you cut a release, and deploy it.
Then development continues until commit 234, but your service is still at 123. Some critical bug is found, and fixed in commit 235. You can't just redeploy at 235 since the in-between may include development of new features that aren't ready, so you just cherry pick the fix to your release.
It's branches in a way, but _only_ release branches. The only valid operations are creating new releases from head, or applying cherrypicks to existing releases.