Surprising (unwanted) behavior with AVH git flow release finish

[slawo]

Why does git flow release finish <release> merge master back to develop?

This is contrary to the original git flow implementation and it seems to be enabled by default.

It there a way to avoid bringing master back to develop when we finish a release or anything else?

[maldag]

I guess the idea is to make sure develop is up to date with master.

[slawo]

@maldag, in the original gitflow master is moved into develop only when develop is created. Auto magically merging master into develop was not the intended behavior in the original gitflow.

Master is supposed to receive changes from release and from hotfix only.
Develop is supposed to receive changes from feature, release and hotfix. Some people or teams will add more commits to develop, but this is up to them. But outside of the creation of develop there is no case where commits to master are supposed to be moved to develop.
Commits in master that are not made in develop are supposed to be specific to the master branch. It then becomes the responsibility of the team to manage these changes. So it should never happen automatically.

[slawo]

A very common and simple example is this:

You create a project.
In the develop branch you add a readme with some shields.
Once you release the project in the master branch you will changes the shields to reference the master branch.
If you never change these again you will have real information about the develop branch in the develop branch, and you will have the information about the current status of the published master branch in the master branch.
If you merge changes from master back to develop you loose the current status of the develop branch in the readme when you look at this branch. And while this is the branch your team wants to see, merging master back to develop will mess things up.

Same thing with more specific info, configuration or test files that are specific for the master branch.

[vukanac]

Maybe this created confusion:

Finally, the changes made on the release branch need to be merged back into develop, so that future releases also contain these bug fixes.

• source: nvie

If we are looking the same picture, I see an arrow from master to develop.

hotfix example

Maybe your point of view contains valid requests, for badges etc.... but maybe additional options in git flow.

git flow release finish -b

Help:

-b, --[no]nobackmerge          Don't back-merge master, or tag if applicable, in develop

Another point of view is this comment.

[petervanderdoes]

A long time ago, 2010, this was a discussion at nvie. It has to do with git describe See nvie/gitflow#49