How to work with starter kits and their updates?

Question

When I start a new project based on a nice starter kit like this Angular 2 one. How do you keep up with changes to a base repo like this?

I know that it is a 'starter', but it would be nice to merge smart new insights from the starter kit into my own code base. What's the most commonly used Git workflow to do this?

I mean, I add my code and change maybe a lot of files in the meantime. How do other developers handle this without spending hours solving all kinds of merge conflicts etc. Any special kinds of branching/remotes/sub repo's?

Answer 1

There's no standard procedure or commonly-used Gitflow that specifically addresses this problem. As with most things in software development, you weight the costs of the new library against the benefits on a case by case basis, and decide whether or not to upgrade.

Observe the Semantic Versioning rules (for those libraries that observe them), and treat with greater respect those upgrades that represent a major version change (and therefore probably introduce breaking changes).

In practice, most of these libraries are pretty well encapsulated, so unless it's a major update (like Angular 1 to Angular 2, which overhauled the Angular architecture), it is seldom a major issue to upgrade. Typically, you might need to make some small adjustments to your code.