Thanks for the feature branch book recommendation.
Overall, feature branches work well as an approach for relatively modern systems. I once worked on a distributed, multi-process system from the 90s that powered more than 40 factories across the world monitoring and steering production of goods. Every factory could decide whether to upgrade and to which version. Each upgrade was a separate project, which had to go through a public offering and deploy at times when the factory was not operating.
The inability of central IT to exercise influence on the factories to upgrade (due to the rollout costs) and reduce the number of parallel versions, caused a multitude of support branches to be maintained for this system. We maintained at least 6 active branches in parallel, backporting bugfixes across branches and being able to release hotfixes at any point in time for these versions. Although another VCS was used for managing source code and build artifacts, for development, we have successfully managed to use git with multiple, long-lived support branches and merge fixes across these, like in gitflow.
Overall, feature branches work well as an approach for relatively modern systems. I once worked on a distributed, multi-process system from the 90s that powered more than 40 factories across the world monitoring and steering production of goods. Every factory could decide whether to upgrade and to which version. Each upgrade was a separate project, which had to go through a public offering and deploy at times when the factory was not operating.
The inability of central IT to exercise influence on the factories to upgrade (due to the rollout costs) and reduce the number of parallel versions, caused a multitude of support branches to be maintained for this system. We maintained at least 6 active branches in parallel, backporting bugfixes across branches and being able to release hotfixes at any point in time for these versions. Although another VCS was used for managing source code and build artifacts, for development, we have successfully managed to use git with multiple, long-lived support branches and merge fixes across these, like in gitflow.