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branching a lot a misuse?

From: Davy Durham <pubaddr3_at_davyandbeth.com>
Date: 2006-09-08 04:14:17 CEST

When I'm done with an implementation phase and want to go into beta
testing phase (while still doing some development on the trunk) I create
a branch called /branches/betatesting

Then I may have several beta phases that restart on a weekly basis
whereby I do the following:
1) work on trunk
2) beta testing phase begins, so I create /branches/betatesting copying
the trunk to it
3) some work continues within trunk
4) small fixes are made to /branches/betatesting as bugs are reported
5) a week passes and it's time for the next beta phase
6) merge changes from /branches/betatesting back to trunk
7) svn delete branches/betatesting
8) recreate branches/betatesting (as in step 2)
9) goto step 3) (until release is ready)

So, the gist of it is that I'm deleting and re-creating a branch with
the same name repeatedly but merging changes from it back to trunk
before deleting.

My question is, is this an abuse/misuse of branches? Will it make
history look funny after a long time? Will it degrade performance after
a long time?

I wouldn't need steps 7 and 8 if merge tracking were implemented into
svn because I would simply merge branch to trunk and trunk to branch at
the start of each beta phase.

The whole point of it is to be able to continue some work on the trunk
while beta testing is going on, and being able to fix bugs in branch for
beta users without them having to get any potentially broken changes
from the trunk until the next beta phase starts.

Is there a ETA on a merge tracking feature in svn? Will it help with
this issue?

If this is fine, just let me know. If this proceedure is silly and
there is a better way, then I'd like to know that too.

Thanks in advance,
   Davy

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Received on Fri Sep 8 15:42:58 2006

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