If you can separate out the twenty files that might be different between the two projects - put them into a different folder for the "A" application as well, and not just for "B" - then your process likely gets even easier.

Then you can have the files in "B" be a straight up ongoing branch of what's different from the changes in "A".

Create that branch by first making a copy of those 20 files from "A", then replacing them with the versions from B & committing.

Eric.

On 1/2/14, 2:25 PM, Mike Fochtman wrote:
I'm part of a small development team (currently 4). We have two applications used in-house that consist of about 1900 source files. The two applications share about 1880 of the files in common, and there are only about 20 different between them.

For a lot of complicated reasons I won't go into here, we can't split the common files into a shared-library sort of project.

Most of our development goes on in application 'A'. Currently we then transferred over to the other application 'B' development machine manually and build/test that one.

I was thinking of having all the 'A' files be in the main /application/trunk tree of the repository and then somehow have just the 20 or so files unique to 'B' in some sort of /application/branches/Bapp directory tree.

This means I'd have to 'switch' those 20 files, (one time only right?), on the B-development machine so it would be a mix of mostly /trunk and just those few files under /branches/Bapp.

This would mean that once changes made on the 'A' system are committed, we could just go to the 'B' machine, do an update, and build. If a change happened to be on one of the 20 files, we would have to 'merge' that change from /trunk over into the /branches/Bapp tree, right?? I think we can live with that.

Does this sound like it would work, or is there a better way (short of splitting 1880 files off into some other project)??

Currently the team hasn't used any form of version control on these applications because 'it would be too hard...' I desperately want to get it/them under subversion without making two complete projects. I know subversion won't 'share' files between projects and I understand about that. But I just need a way to deal with these 20 out of 1900 files. (may even be less than that when we start actually digging into it)


Thanks for any input.

Mike Fochtman
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