How can i work on more than one hotfix at a time in sourcetree?

Jake Bishop1

I have a few bugs that i need to fix. Some of them involve some team collaboration so the hotfix branches will be pushed to remote. However, if i attempt to start more than one hotfix sourcetree gives me the following message:

git hotfix start fix-a-bug-2
There is an existing hotfix branch (fix-a-bug-1). Finish that one first.
Completed with errors, see above

How can i create multiple hotfixes? Or if this is not allowed, what is a good work flow to deal with such situations?

stevestreeting

This is unfortunately how git-flow works (that message is from git-flow itself). Why do you need more than one hotfix branch? The assumption is that if you're doing hotfixes, then there's just one release which you'll be patching, and you'll do it asap so there's not need to split them into multiple branches. If you're collaborating, you can just collaborate on that one hotfix branch. the assumption being that all the fixes here will be much smaller than the new features going back into develop, and therefore they don't really justify their own branches for each fix.

I guess if you really needed to, you could manually create additional fix branches off the hotfix branch (without using the hotfix prefix to avoid confusing git-flow), and merge those back into the hotfix branch before closing it. git-flow doesn't have a workflow for that though, so you'd have to organise that manually before using git-flow to close off the hotfix branch itself. This feels overkill to me but it's probably doable.