Branches

Sean Gillies sgillies at FRII.COM
Thu May 17 11:04:33 EDT 2007


Howard Butler wrote:
> 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
> 

It's only easy to merge changes back into the trunk if people keep their 
sandboxes regularly updated against changes to the trunk. I learned this 
the hard way.

Sandboxes would be good. RFC branches might also be worth some 
consideration. There is already some consensus about what does and does 
not require an RFC, and the same guidelines could be applied to what 
does or does not go straight into the trunk.

Sean



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