Best practice Q: when is it necessary to branch?

Hello,

I have what I call a "best practice" question:

When is it necessary (or at least useful) to branch?

Here's my current answers (or at least how my group has been operating thus
far):

1) When one needs to do "side"/private development in a way that breaks the
day-to-day builds of the trunk.

2) When one needs to make bug fixes of an old revision/tag of the repo
(possibly by back-merging fixes/features in a future revision) without
inheriting all the new stuff in the trunk.

Is this a comprehensive and concise list?

I realize this is a rather broad question (and possibly a faq somewhere),
but I'm rather short on research time at the moment, so I seek guidance
from the community.

I believe I want to minimize the number of branches made in my repos,
although I feel like I want to tag often (I review a "tag" simply as an
alias to a svnversion number--sort of a read-only branch). Is this, too, a
reasonable and effective approach?

Thanks for any comments,
-Matt

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Received on Tue Mar 28 20:18:03 2006