Version Control Reliability & UX

Announcements
21

Hey Bubble team!

Are there any near future updates for version control? We feel that this is a bottleneck for us, and most likely for massive adoption of bubble by other companies - therefore it feels that this could be a priority to tackle? Can you share what are the latest plans for this?

22

Hey! So engineering work is in progress for a multi-phased, complete overhaul of Version Control (think new Responsive, but for version control :slight_smile: ). The first phase will focus on a new, hopefully more user friendly, reliable, and transparent user experience, while later phases will layer in new functionality like previewing save points and branch change logs.

We will keep the forum updated as we get closer to launch, but in the mean time, feel free to send me a PM if you’d like to be included in any user testing as we work through development.

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23

I am waiting for this one very very eagerly. Please keep us posted on when can we expect this to go live.

@nate6 has summed up the problem with version control really well, and the biggest issue because of that is this:

In our application even though I can add collaborators I am not adding any now because I don’t trust new developers’ abilities. It is landmine like Nate says. This is hurting our progress really significantly.

1 Like
24

Hi!
For version control, some wordings are unclear right now :bomb::

  • “Sync with Main” – does it mean pull or push? → Rename it “Pull from main”
  • “Merge changes from another branch” – merge is the generic term → here you mean “Pull changes from another branch”, make it clear, so everything is clear.
    It’s the same things on the branches buttons, in the branches popups, in the branches history… sync/merge is always unclear if you are pulling from x or pushing to x.

Also, another feedback: I think everybody on earth works the same:
Create a Branch, work, pull Main, go to Main, pull Branch, QA that the pull went well, delete Branch.
The problem is that now, to pull a Branch to main, you need to go to Main, and to delete a Branch you need to go back to the Branch. And each back and forth takes 30 seconds to load, which is really annoying. And this leads to procrastinating deleting branches, which leads to having lots of messy archived branches :bomb:, or it leads toward making several features in one branche, which is also not rigorous at all :bomb:.

While there would be really really simple solutions to this problem:

  • Replace the Delete button by a “Freeze & Delete”(/"Archive) button : freeze the branch gets freezed for 8 days, you can’t edit it anymore, but you can go to main, and Pull the branch. If there is a merging/QA problem, you can unfreeze it and modify it again. If there is no problem, you forget the branch, and it gets deleted 8 days later.
    OR
  • Right click/··· three dots menu from the branches panel, and be able to delete a branch from Main, without switching back to the branch (without needing to reload the branch). From the branch panel, you already see “Modified 30mins ago”, and you need to type “delete branch-xxx” in the branch deletion popup, so it’s already pretty safe.
    OR
  • For additional safety, have the same Right click/··· three dots menu to delete a branch from Main, but unable deleting a branch only if it has already been Freezed. So to close the loop on the whole process: you finish your feature, you pull from main, you Freeze the branch (you can’t modify it anymore, unless you unfreeze it), you go to main, you pull your Branch, you QA, you delete your (freezed) branch.