Re: Best practice Q: when is it necessary to branch?

On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 12:16:58PM -0600, Matt England wrote:
> 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.

I think of branches as something to use whenever you feel that you will
restrain yourself from committing because you don't want to create
trouble for others.

> 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.

Agreed.

> Is this a comprehensive and concise list?

I'm sure there's plenty of more use cases for branches, but I believe
these are the two primary.

> 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?

With Subversions cheap copies there's no problem in tagging away.

-- 
Cheers,
- Jacob Atzen
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