[cvsnt] newbie branch/merge question

[Gerhard Fiedler]

Nick Duane wrote:

> Thank you.  I'll look this over and see how well this will work for us.  The 
> one thing that comes to mind at this point (assuming I understand what 
> you're saying below) is that the releases are simply tags in the trunk as 
> opposed to branches.  Now maybe a symbolic tag and a branch are pretty 
> similar, as I said I'm new to CVS so I'm not sure about that.  I'm thinking 
> that I would like a branch for each release we intend to make so that we can 
> have a well defined place to pull releases from as opposed to just taging 
> the trunk at a release.  Plus we often have times when developers are 
> working on more than one release at a time and thus we'll need separate 
> locations for those.

What we do is we tag a release. That's a good thing to do even if you
should branch later. Then, when the need arises to fix something in that
release, we branch it from that tag. This is a trivial operation: update to
the release tag and create a branch right there. Then update to the branch
tag.

The reasoning is like this: You probably want a tag at the branch root
anyway, because that's the only way to get the branch root later. Before
you need to work on the release, there's no need for an additional branch
tag. So we avoid tag clutter by only tagging releases. Only when we need to
make a change to a release, we create a branch starting at the already
existing release tag.

IMO it's helpful to have a naming convention. We start all normal tags with
"t" and all branches with "b". And the tag at the branch root has the same
name as the associated branch (except for the starting letter). 

Gerhard