Git: application configuration and different environments

Question

We use git for most of the web applications we build in our shop, and though the applications themselves use a variety of technologies (PHP, Rails, etc), we generally have a sta

Answer 1

I assume that usually, master only holds commits that are already in staging. If you add an extra commit to master which contains the differences in configuration between the two branches, then rebasing this commit on top of whatever is pulled from staging should maintain the configuration. This isn't quite as simple as "merging staging into master shouldn't affect master config files in any way", but as you'd get a merge conflict in these cases, it may be close enough.