[Gdal-dev] RFC 3: GDAL Commiter Guildlines

[Daniel Morissette]

Marek Brudka wrote:
> 
> "New features or significant changes to existing source code should be 
> commited to separate private branches. Merging to the main trunk is 
> allowed only after testing them by separate developers on various 
> platforms."
> 

Ouch... I don't want to imagine what the SVN repository will look like 
in a few years if we keep creating private branches for everything. Even 
just one private branch per committer (and likely per committer per 
software release) is likely to lead to quite a mess. That's assuming I 
understood Mateusz' explanation right and branching indeed means 
duplicating the whole directory tree on the server. (As I wrote before, 
in CVS a branch is just a tag and the cost IMO is lower than full 
duplication of everything so that would be less of an issue.)

Is it really common practive with SVN-based projects to create private 
branches and merge like this? Is this not abusing the features of the 
source code management system? Is there a way to physically delete a 
private branch from the SVN server and remove any trace from it in order 
to keep the repository clean?

Just thinking out loud...

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/