On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Andy Lester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Aug 5, 2008, at 11:12 AM, chromatic wrote: > >> Don't use long-lived branches. The smaller the merge in *any* system, the >> easier it is. > > > I agree 100%. If you think your project is so big that you have to have a > long-lived branch, then it should be broken up into smaller, mergeable > milestones.
I agree 50%. =-) In my particular case, it's not a question of big in terms of -code-. it's big in terms of time to deliver. Something that I might have planned to take a week in a branch may be interrupted by real life for several months. > Branches that don't merge back to trunk regularly are out of touch with the > rest of development. I disagree. Branches that don't rebase from trunk regularly are out of touch, yes. If you rebase regularly, then you're basically just a patch waiting to be applied. > Length of a branch increases technical debt of merging exponentially. Given our current toolset, it certainly does increase. However, there appear to be tools for which this issue is greatly mitigated. If we can adapt our toolset to fit our community instead of adapting our community to fit our toolset, I'd rather go that way. I'd like something that let us: 1) keep trunk pretty close to release-quality all the time. We're pretty much at this point now. 2) work on sharable branches that... 3) were easily rebased from trunk. 4) were easily merged back into trunk We're a little weak on #3 and #4 at the moment. (It just took me 20-30 minutes to run an svn:merge command between the no_builtin_methods branch and the repository, and then a few more minutes to clean up some things that shouldn't have been included, presumably as a result of issues with #3.) Whatever methodology we end up with, we also want it to address the fact that it's probably going to be different once we have 1.0; We're going to have to start using branches regularly to handle maintenance and new feature releases. I would hesitate to recommend our current system for that. Regards. > xoox, > Andy > > -- > Andy Lester => [EMAIL PROTECTED] => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance > > > > > -- Will "Coke" Coleda
