Re: simple question on branching

On 11/3/2010 11:56 AM, Andy Levy wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 09:44, KM<info4km_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> We don't often use branching and/or merging based on the simple nature of our version releases with very little overlap. We have a longer ranging version - the next 7 months or so in progress. Since we are getting ready to deliver some file changes I'd like to use the trunk instead of a branch just because it's easier.
>>
>> There is a very little chance we would really need to release anything to the previous production level during these 7 months. If it came up I was going to just copy the tag to a branch and use that for development - and basically tagging it (or maybe even merging into the tag).
>>
>> Any reason that creating a permanent branch on the tree would matter -- i mean never merging it anywhere? I don't see what harm it would have really - but I just wanted to be sure in case I decide to branch from the production version of the trunk instead.
>>
>> Probably a silly question - but it's good to have input from others who branch and merge regularly.
>> Thx for any help. If it matters - we are still on svn 1.4.3.
>
> A "permanent branch" with no merging sounds more like a fork than a
> branch - a snapshot of your project at a moment in time, then it
> continues on its own independent development path. Shouldn't be any
> issues from a technical perspective, it just might get difficult to
> manage if at some point you do need to merge between the 2 forks.

I think it is fairly common to always copy trunk->branch-tag for
everything that you might consider to be a release, where the branch
would be used for any pre-release QA testing you might do and serve as
the place for any release-maintenance changes needed for that release.
Those changes might or might not be relevant to the trunk - or might
already be present in the trunk by the time you decide to backport to
the already released version so it is hard to generalize about merges
there. If you do make changes, you should then copy to a new tag as you
finalize the update so you have human-friendly names to track the
released versions.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell_at_gmail.com