Comments on: Guide And Best Practices For Subversion Branching

By: KD Web Dev: Subversion Best Practices

KD Web Dev: Subversion Best Practices — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:37:32 +0000

[...] http://brajeshwar.com/2007/sub.....ick-notes/ http://devnulled.com/content/2.....branching/ http://www.karlkatzke.com/best.....ubversion/ [...]

By: Best Practice Visual Studio with SVN, VCS and SCM « Kevin Steffer

Best Practice Visual Studio with SVN, VCS and SCM « Kevin Steffer — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:21:23 +0000

[...] http://devnulled.com/content/2.....branching/ [...]

By: Pete

Pete — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:55:23 +0000

In my experience separate branches for major pieces of work cause problems at merge time. We have had different projects working on different branches all scheduled to leave at the same time. The problem comes when you merge, the first merge is typically painless but the last one is horrendous, what’s more is the branches themselves become stale and the only visibility you have is at integration. This can however be mitigated with SVN as is nicely handles merges from trunk to branch and ultimately back again.

By: Spike

Spike — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:41:21 +0000

Yeah, that’s in line with my experience, in some cases it causes more problems than it solves, but for distributed development, especially where the project has different teams that work semi-autonomously, it can be very useful which is why I mentioned it.

By: Brandon Harper

Brandon Harper — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:54:14 +0000

Thanks for the link Spike, I hadn't seen that before (especially being a VSS convert). As for a bit of irony, we actually started off doing the "Flying Fish" method of branching listed on that site and found it very troublesome because of all of the commits occurring in many different places, as well as not being able to see the full, incremental history in trunk. I suppose with as with all things technology related, the right answer starts off with "it depends"; I thought I'd just pass on something I thought was good as well as some personal experiences and observations.

By: Spike

Spike — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:56:30 +0000

There are many ways to approach branching and use it heavily to the benefit of your projects. I have used the flying fish approach on several projects and found that it removes some problems common to most revision control systems. Most notably, the ability of each developer to tag, track and commit on their own branch without worrying about how it will affect others. Merging becomes a more involved and complex process, but the benefits can outweigh that; particularly if you are working with a distributed development team who aren’t always within easy access if something is wrong with the code they committed the night before.

There’s a good section in the “Open source Development with CVS” book dedicated to the discussion of branching. It includes a good description of flying fish and a couple of other approaches. Although the book is written for CVS, the branching chapters apply equally to Subversion.

Here’s a link to save you the time of googling for it: http://computing.ee.ethz.ch/se.....html#SEC84