Is there a git workflow to describe this scenario?

Currently working from two branches : develop

Feature branches are created from develop and when the changes is complete the feature branch is then merged back to develop.

Currently, we are working on a significant update named u1 that will not be complete for 3 months. In the meantime, we will need to provide other functionality and hotfixes to the current release that is unrelated to u1.

To accomplish this change, I suggest the following :

Create a new branch from develop that will include only the features for u1. All u1 related features will be added to the u1 branch. Continue to create hotfixes etc, feature branches from develop and merge the hotfixes to develop. At some point when u1 is feature complete merge the u1 branch to develop (which contains the hotfixes previously described). Is there a name for this git strategy, are there alternative ways of managing this git workflow ?

Solution

A general practice that I have encountered consists of the following rules:

there is a master branch, which is equivalent to the code in production
there is a develop branch, which is used to stage and test feature branches
a feature branch is created from master
when a feature branch is ready for testing, merge it to develop
if the feature branch's test was unsuccessful, then return to it
if the feature branch's test was successful, then before you deploy, merge it to master
just before deployment, you do a smoke test on master, that is, you test everything that realistically could go wrong as well as features of critical importance
if the smoke test failed, determine what causes the problem and clean master and merge only the features that did not cause trouble
if the smoke test succeeded, deploy
hotfix branches are branched out from master and merged into master once they are completed
if there is an epic feature branch, like the one that you have described, then organize it into divisible sub-tasks
each subtask is a task branch branched out from the epic feature branch
once a subtask is completed, merge it into your epic feature branch
smoke test the epic feature branch before you merge it into develop and then smoke test develop
never merge develop into master, since develop may contain untested features
whenever a deploy occurred, merge master into develop as well as your epic feature branches