[Cosmo-dev] Branching

[Brian Moseley]

On 8/14/07, Mike <bear at code-bear.com> wrote:

> This worked well last time with the caveat that the developers *have*
> to backport all 0.7 bug fixes to the trunk.  If that is not done then
> it's not worth creating a branch.  Because of the refactoring that
> normally accompanies a minor rev change, the devs cannot rely on using
> svn merge to automatically backport fixes in one huge chunk - too much
> will have most likely changed.

i disagree with this. if a change on the maintenance branch requires
substantial refactoring that might be hard to merge to the trunk, it's
very likely that's not a change that should be incorporated into a
maintenance release.

there's a higher annoyance cost in every developer having to keep the
maintenance branch and trunk in sync after every commit, and an
increased management overhead, as somebody else has to review every
commit to make sure it is applied in both places. not so when we can
so a single merge after every point release.