Re: Suggestion: Transparent Branching

Hello Marco,

On Wednesday 07 July 2010, Marco Jansen wrote:
> So therefor, what we would like to see is to be able to have a
> transparent branch: One which fetches updates from both branch and
> trunk, without having them listed as changes or triggering commits. In
> essence it's reading from two branches, where a last known revision of a
> file could be from either branch, and committing to one only when it has
> changes from this 'either' latest revision.
FSVS (fsvs.tigris.org) is not a source control system per se, but more of a
filesystem versioning system (like for /usr, /etc, or /).

But: FSVS allows to "overlay" multiple repository URLs, and the "topmost"
entry is visible in the working copy.

See here for some more details:
http://doc.fsvs-software.org/doxygen-gif/group__howto__master__local.html

So the base checkout would be trunk, with an initially empty branch on top
of that. As files get changed they get committed to the branch; updates from
trunk would get through, though.

I'm afraid that this won't fit your bill completely, but if the project is
big enough and the changes sparse enough so that no single file gets changed
on both trunk and branch (or at least so infrequently that it could be
merged manually) it might just work for you.

You're welcome to try it; the main site is http://fsvs.tigris.org, and some
distributions already have packages available.

I'd be happy to hear about any feedback, ideas, and experiences; please
share them on FSVS' users mailing list.

Regards,

Phil
Received on 2010-07-08 08:35:25 CEST