Feature branch merge strategy

Merging feature development branches into production is tricky in this repo: thousands of data files means thousands of potential merge conflicts.

My old strategies:

Merge anyway, manually processing any non-data changes, and then accepting all incoming data changes, or staging the files with merge conflicts. Downside: makes VS Code unhappy, and depending on your settings you may be promped thousands of times for confirmation.
Cherry pick the relevant commits. Downside: for feature branches with a long development history this could include dozens of commits scattered among many data exports, which would all have to be specified individually.
Checkout with --patch to merge only a specific file or folder, e.g. git checkout --patch <feature-branch-name> export-scripts. Downside: this requires reviewing changes in the terminal instead of VS Code's merge editor, which is much more user friendly.

This will involve deleting all data files from a copy of feature branch and the new production merge branch.

Create a new "merge" production branch from production, e.g. merge/2023-12-28/production
On merge/2023-12-28/production, run delete_data_files.[ps1/sh] to delete everything but READMEs and folders from indicators/data, indicators/metadata, neighborhood-reports/data/report, neighborhood-reports/data/viz, neighborhood-reports/metadata and neighborhood-reports/images.
Commit the changes
Create a new "merge" feature branch from the main feature branch, e.g. feature-whatever -> merge/2023-12-28/feature-whatever
On merge/2023-12-28/feature-whatever, run delete_data_files.[ps1/sh]
Commit the changes
Merge merge/2023-12-28/feature-whatever into merge/2023-12-28/production
Run all data export scripts on merge/2023-12-28/production
Commit the changes
PR / merge merge/2023-12-28/production into production

Notes:

The production database has to be updated before you export the data, including data updates or migration, and new or modified views and stored procedures.
Creating a merge copy of the feature branch enables us to use the main feature branch as the data branch in code on EH-dataportal without breaking anything.
It feels dangerous to commit file deletions in a branch that will be merged into production, but it's actually safe. Because you're re-exporting the data on merge/2023-12-28/production, its tip has the data files, and that's what will be merged into production.