"Simon Scott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... > Hi, > > Please could I ask for any advice on the following.
[ Snip: description of scheme whereby branches are partially aliased: in one subtree of the project, branch tags A and B are independent branches. In another subtree, both point to exactly the same branch numbers in every file, therefore coinciding. ] I can't think of anything wrong with this scheme, other than this: people can't independently work on branches A and B for that subtree where it is aliased. Obviously, this is a ``feature'' of the scheme; if you thought that this was a problem, you wouldn't propose it. The aliased part of the tree may well be a highly stable code subject to careful changes, so that rather than destructive interference between the A and B streams, there is actually a positive collaboration from instantly sharing critical bugfixes without having to merge back and forth. A variation of this practice occurs when people branch just a subtree, switch it to that branch, and leave the rest of the working copy on the trunk. They get their own independent stream over that subtree, but pick up changes from the trunk whenever they update. This is almost equivalent to your scheme, except that the trunk is not endowed with the branch tag, so the checkout cannot be done all at once: others who want to participate in the scheme have to do a full checkout of the trunk, go to the branched subdirectory and update that to the branch. If they try to just check out the branch, they won't get the whole tree because the tag does not exist outside of the subtree. This ``lazy branching'' is sometimes done by CVS users, and it works. I have done it in the past, but usually I followed up on it by adding the branch tag to the rest of the tree (hence the term ``lazy'' branching). In other words, just branch the part that you need to branch *now* and then later extend it to the whole tree to make a proper branch. I did this because I did not need to ``freeze'' the rest of the project with respect to my changes; it was beneficial to work in the subtree while integrating with the rest of it by simply doing updates. _______________________________________________ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs