Issue 81 in svnbook: Update feature branches from trunk

svnbook at googlecode.com svnbook at googlecode.com
Wed May 26 10:26:27 CDT 2010


Status: New
Owner: ----
Labels: Type-Defect Priority-Medium

New issue 81 by bugpwr: Update feature branches from trunk
http://code.google.com/p/svnbook/issues/detail?id=81

 From svnbook:

"Another way of thinking about this pattern is that your weekly sync of
trunk to branch is analogous to running svn update in a working copy, while
the final merge step is analogous to running svn commit from a working
copy. After all, what else is a working copy but a very shallow private
branch? It's a branch that's capable of storing only one change at a time."

The recommended practice seems to be misleading, or the industry doesn't
quite know how to use it. For example, see
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2146426/how-to-properly-update-a-feature-branch-from-trunk

The problem is that a developer in a large organization, that would usually
require every feature to get to trunk thru one or two feature branches,
cannot really update these numerous small feature branches (with just a few
changesets) by merging huge amounts of trunk changes to each of them. Even
for a smaller development task force, the approach creates a problem during
reintegration of the feature branch.

Suggesting removal of this section, or, alternative practice, like the one
we employ:

[proposal] "When you want to synchronize with the changes from trunk, but
not yet ready to reintegrate the feature branch, you may open a new feature
branch cut from the current trunk. Then, you merge onto the new branch,
delete the previous one and continue working on the new branch. This way,
the merge is always downward (Feature branches -> trunk -> release  
branches)."







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