How do I maintain custom mods for customers & not have to merge them to many branches

Hi,

We just started using SVN this past year - moved from VSS and it's been a good move. The problem is, almost every customer we get requires some custom mods to some portion of the code. At this point, each customer seems to be getting their own branch and we do fixes and development in our trunk and then merge changes, as needed into the customer branches. This works okay for now but as the number of customers grows we are worried about this setup requiring too much maintenance.

The idea was thrown out - could we somehow get into a position where we maintain our trunk as the base code, and then have some 'overlay' of code for each customer - this 'overlay' would contain only the custom mods that were done for that customer. Then have some build or check out process that would extract our base, then extract the customer-specific overlay files and drop them on top of the base code and generate a build from that source. The problem we are trying to get away from is, our development team having to merge a base fix from the trunk into each and every customer SVN branch. We are trying to turn over part of this headache to a support group but currently we have to merge our base trunk changes into the customer-specific branches. This is the general idea - I know we can't just blindly drop the customer mods on top of our base without possibly back-leveling our base trunk fixes.

Just looking for suggestions on how others handle situations like this?
Received on 2011-09-16 18:44:47 CEST