Working while waiting for pending PR

Question

I'm working on a project and I submitted my first pull request and while I'm waiting I want to continue on working on my project building up from what I worked on the merge that's still pending on. Right now I have :

*master
user_story_1

user_story_1 has an open pull request.

Now I'm trying to create a new branch user_story_2 where I can continue the work I left of at user_story_1. How can I do this in Git without getting into any conflict or affecting my pending merge?

Answer 1

I'm assuming you want to start the new user_story_2 branch on top of the work you've done in user_story_1. Here's the workflow I use in this sort of scenario:

1. Open Pull Request for user_story_1:

     * (user_story_1)   *  / * (master) * * 

2. Create new branch user_story_2 based on user_story_1:

   $ git checkout -b user_story_2 user_story_1

     * (user_story_1, user_story_2)   *  / * (master) * * 

3. Work on the new branch:

     * (user_story_2)   *         * (user_story_1)   *  / * (master) * * 

4. Pull Request gets merged:

     * (user_story_2)   *       * | (master) |\| | * (user_story_1) | * |/ * * * 

5. Delete old branch:

     * (user_story_2)   *       * | (master) |\| | * | * |/ * * * 

6. Rebase new branch onto master:

     * (user_story_2)   *        / * (master) |\ | * | * |/ * * * 

Answer 2

My preferred workflow for this:

1. On branch master, git checkout -b user_story_1.
2. Make changes to user_story_1.
3. Open PR for user_story_1.
4. On branch user_story_1, git checkout -b user_story_2.
5. Make changes to user_story_2.
6. Once user_story_1 gets merged into master, switch to user_story_2 and do git rebase -i master.
7. This should show you a list of commits on user_story_2 that you want to include in the rebase. Delete the top few commits that came from user_story_1.
8. The rebase should complete cleanly unless master was updated with other changes. Now you have user_story_2 rebased on master and only having its commits.