RE: Branching strategy - Feature vs Release

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 21:22 +0000, Richard Gundersen wrote:

> I think if the software being developed was a product e.g. StarOffice, then
> yes, I can see why you might want to use release branches. Because there are
> various versions in use at any one time.

Not only in use, but you may have multiple new versions in QA testing
concurrently and you'll want to tag the release straight from its
testing branch so as not to affect anything else.

> I guess I made the assumption that the system is only going to be running in
> one place - one production server (or one cluster perhaps). When I've been
> defending the feature-based approach, this is type of system I've had in
> mind. You can therefore link every tag on the trunk with a point of time at
> which that version of the system was running in production.

A tag isn't exactly 'on' the trunk - it becomes its own entity and has
its history regardless.

> But, for the systems that I had in mind, which are never going to be sold on
> because they are part of a company's infrastructure, or a website, I think
> the stable-trunk still wins.

I can see an advantage for stable-trunk where you permit public access
to the repository so everyone doesn't have to know about the purpose
of each branch. Otherwise the trunk may be more valuable for new
development work that hasn't reached the QA stage yet.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@gmail.com
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