On 2011-02-19, Troy Howard wrote: > Disclaimer: Troy's Personal Opinions (tm) which may be controversial, > will be found below
> Regarding the idea of 'feature branches', I guess I should make it > clear that I personally don't agree with this workflow in SVN. > This is completely appropriate for Mercurial or Git, because they were > designed for that. SVN however, was not, and branching becomes costly > because it bloats the repo, causing updates or initial downloads to be > much larger, and merging is confusing and difficult with SVN. Stefan's personal opinion: merging in svn isn't as bad as it gets painted but a DVCS certainly makes it look easier. Feature branches are a good idea for * experiments * controversial changes so that you could show where you wanted to go for better discussion * really big changes that take long to implement and many iterations to get right where you didn't want to disturb trunk In general I tend to avoid them, though. > Also, a big part of this is that many people have the opinion that > 'trunk' should be stable. I think this philosophy is incorrect. > Instead, stable revisions should be tagged, and trunk should be viewed > as unstable, possibly not building or functioning correctly. Commits > should occur frequently, and be isolated to a very small scope per > commit. +1 (except that I prefer trunk to build all the time). Stefan
