Branching suggestions needed...

[James Depaul]

Hi folks -

We're trying to decide on a simple branching strategy for our team. So far here's what we're planning - please comment on the approach to help us start small and grow as we learn:

So far, we only use CvS to version individual files (checkout, work on files, check them back in when you've tested your changes) - currently we don't use any TAGs, or branches at all. This works ok but we'd like to improve that process. Here's the proposed flow:

Every Wednesday we have scheduled delivery date. I'm thinking that just prior to the final build create a /Branch - I'm thinking of it as a special TAG that marks the completion of that development cycle. Do the build using that /Branch, and deploy it accross the infrastructure (DEV, QUAL, PROD, respectively).

From that point forward, any code fixes should be done to the /Branch code. Any NEW development should continue on the /main trunk (and hopefully there won't be many mistakes - that I'm sure would complicate this for us).

Thus we'd have an early branch each time we build/deploy and any fixes to that code base would be performed on that /Branch, while new development would continue in parallel on /trunk. What I'm not sure about is: if we do have fixes when do we need to merge them into the /main trunk code? What happens if we gave fixes on the /Branch, we merge them into the /trunk and we have OTHER fixes to make to the prior release?

Your comments will be appreciated -

THanks,
James