jargon

Architecture & practice·Delivery, flow and technical debt

the migration branch was six weeks old and the merge conflicts were in files neither change was about.

Long-lived branch

Also calledmerge hell, integration hell

A branch that lives long enough for the mainline to move substantially underneath it. The pain grows faster than the branch's age, because conflicts multiply and the reviewer eventually faces a diff too large to read honestly. It is the strongest practical argument for branch by abstraction: big changes still need to be integrated in small pieces, whatever the size of the change.

Commonly confused with