Alternate Branch Strategies
Different branch plans do not explicitly define deployment approaches, however, there are common associative methods for each plan, which are described in the subsequent pages. This page provides the baseline terminology that will be used in the remainder of this material.
Trunk Based
Commonly referred to as Trunk Based Development. This is the simplest strategy and is commonly synonymous with Continuous Delivery (more on this to come). The only long running branch is main.
From https://statusneo.com/trunk-based-development.
Simple Branch Plans
This branch strategy has been promoted by Microsoft, and is fundamental in their deploy process within Visual Studio. with two (or sometimes more) long-lived branches, e.g. main being used for test and release being used for production. Each additional environment requires another branch.
GitFlow
Originating from distributed source control systems, with prolonged disconnection. The majority of source control tools provided now are centralised server solutions, which obfuscate the underlying distributed architecture. GitFlow has continued, while being adjusted to use Pull Request/Merge Request to merge between branches. This typically has many long-lived branches, e.g. main, develop, release, hot-fix.
From Atlassian https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow
