On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 18:00, Richard Gundersen wrote:
> In my last job, the systems I looked after were used in 20+ countries. So,
> one copy of the system, with lots of customisations. Each country would have
> their own changes. Sometimes they would be cosmetic and low risk. Other
> times, they would say 'Spain has a new law regarding X. The system must
> support this law on 1st August 2007'. The application change cannot however
> be released before then. It must be released at midnight, 31 July 2007,
> otherwise the system is operating illegally.
>
> At the same time, Germany has another change. Theirs will take a long time
> to implement so development must also be started now. But theirs must not be
> released until 1st October 2007.
>
> If all development is done on one trunk branch, then at some point I have to
> tell Germany that because Spain MUST have their change, I have to release
> their change too. I know what will happen - Germany will stop using the
> system.
That's only true if you add an unnecessary constraint that your
releases have to be directly from the trunk. If you tag/release
from branches you can support any number of versions concurrently.
> Using feature branches, when it comes to 31 July 2007, I just merge their
> change into the trunk and release it. (OK, this would be done maybe a week
> or two in advance for testing purposes). Germany isn't affected. Everyone is
> happy.
In subversion the difference between a branch and trunk (and
tags for that matter) is completely arbitrary - it's just a
directory name and the capabilities are all the same. I think
it makes sense to use the trunk for the thing you least want
to keep track of. For a lot of projects, I'd expect that to
be where to put/get today's new changes. For QA and releases
you are going to have to track specific names anyway.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@gmail.com
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Received on Thu Nov 9 04:53:34 2006