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20030429 Tuesday April 29, 2003

My understanding of CVS I've been using CVS for a couple of years now, but only recently have I been responsible for tagging and branching. Dave is using the branching feature on Roller, and we're using it at our day job. Here's how I think it works - please correct me if I'm wrong.

When you create a branch, you can continue working on that branch - providing you check it out. This means that you cannot have HEAD checked out and update from the branch. Or can you? I tried this with Roller a couple night ago, and I don't think I got the 091_BRANCH. However, last night when I tried to check stuff in, it said I was on a branch. Wierd.

At work right now, I've created a 2.0 branch, and we're working on this to fix bugs in our beta release. The other day, I checked out HEAD, and did a merge from the 2.0 branch. Then I created a 2.0.1 branch. When we're with 2.0 and we make it a final release, I'll do another merge with HEAD. Is this how you do it? Do you work on a branch and merge/re-tag every few days? It'd be cool if checking in a file on a branch automagically checked it into the HEAD. Posted in Java at Apr 29 2003, 10:58:26 AM MDT 3 Comments

Comments:

Yes, you can, but you have to check the branch out to a different directory using -d. I always did -d <branch_name> Then, you essentially have two parallel code bases. The big headache comes when you want to integrate - hint: more often = better. HTH,

Posted by Keith Sader on April 29, 2003 at 03:23 PM MDT #

You should only branch, if you want to work independently for a longer period of time, because merging is additional work and may introduce new problems silently. Usually you will try to update from the main branch as often as possible, because otherwise integration at the end may get very difficult. Typically you would merge changes back to the main branch only if your feature is completed.

Posted by Unknown on April 30, 2003 at 02:17 AM MDT #

Talking of CVS, I would recommand you to try out Subversion. It's a replacement for CVS, but much much better... faster and lighter by a magnitude, easy to install and maintain, supports all the feature that are BADLY missing in CVS ( Versioning directories, rename, move ), and much more :) You can find it in http://subversion.tigris.org/ And you can check out Jakarta's Wiki regarding Subversion/WhyUseSubversion

Posted by Yannick Menager on May 01, 2003 at 02:15 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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