Branches

[Howard Butler]

Folks,

Branches in CVS were extremely painful, somewhat error prone, and I  
think for the most part only Daniel and Steve made them in relation  
to releases.  Now that we have subversion, a branch/tag is just a  
copy, and its creation and removal is as simple as 'svn mkdir' or  
'svn rmdir'.

With that in mind, what is people's opinion about developers creating  
their own branches at will in a directory like ./sandbox?  Many other  
open source software projects use this pattern, with some even taking  
it to the extreme that all work is done in a branch and merged back  
into trunk.  I do not propose that we follow that development model  
because I rather like having most activity in trunk -- it makes  
people aware of the consequences of their actions on other folks and  
makes buildbot testing simple.  However, it would be nice from time  
to time to have a place to stuff experiments or do things that aren't  
mainstream development with the option of easily bringing it in when  
it's ready.

Howard