RE: Why have a trunk dir, anyway?!

The branch pattern you have described here is called a continual
cascade. The nature and pitfalls of it are described here, part of a
document that is well worth a read:
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/acme/branching/pitfalls.html#Continu
alCascading

Long story short... continual cascade is OK for projects where the whole
team is all working on the next release together at the same time. It
begins to fall apart when you have R5 and R6 due at different dates in
the future, but must begin work in parallel because R6 will take a lot
longer than R5.

-----Original Message-----
From: Irvine, Chuck R [EQ] [mailto:Chuck.R.Irvine@Embarq.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 2:31 PM
To: users@subversion.tigris.org
Cc: Hartleroad, James M [EQ]; Smythe, Susan M [EQ]
Subject: Why have a trunk dir, anyway?!

A very intuitive branching structure, often the first one that people
think of in my experience, is:

R1
---------------------------
           \
            \ R2
             \-------------------------
                        \
                         \ R3
                          \-------------------------
                                            \
                                  \ R4
                                   \-------------------------
                                              .
                                              .
                                              .

Now, with CVS you couldn't do this because you would become further and
further diverged from the trunk. And, with CVS, deleting branches wasn't
really an option.

However, with Subversion, the branching scheme above seems perfectly
do-able, at least as far as I can see. Especially, if you do away with
the concept of the trunk. Instead of having:

Proj/
        trunk/
        branches/
        tags/

You might have something like:

Proj/
        releases/
                R1/
                        main/
                        branches/
                        tags/
                R2/
                        main/
                        branches/
                        tags/

When a new release RN needs to start, just branch off of RN-1. As new
release goes into production, old releases can be retired (deleted).

So, my question is, why do we need the trunk concept anyway? Is it just
because we've been conditioned by CVS that you have to have a trunk. Or,
are there valid reasons? Also, can anyone see a problem with the second
of the two branching structures described above?

All comments appreciated. Thanks.

Chuck
                        

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Received on Sun Apr 29 22:52:28 2007