> Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:50:13 -0700
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: RE: Some articles about the social issues of version control
>
>
> On Sat, June 14, 2008 10:50 pm, Gabriel Sechan wrote:
>> What you do in P4 is check in to your own branch if its really a problem.
>> Although unless the team is large, I haven't had much of a problem with
>> centralized version control without branches- breaks are found quickly
>> and you know who did it, he just has to go fix it. In the meantime, you
>> revert your local copy. On teams of a few dozen people it can be bad, but
>> on teams of 6 or so central works perfectly well, and has less overhead.
>> Of course, its just a special case of the n^2 communication problem- the
>> bigger the team, the more avenues of communication and interaction there
>> are to cause problems. The number of avenues is always O(n^2). Part of
>> why I really love small teams.
>>
>> Gabe
>>
>
> One shouldn't branch because code is untested. Branch only when code
> shouldn't be mixed for good reasons.
>
> - different feature sets as in different releases
>
> - returning to a baseline to fix a defect in fielded code
>
> - creative noodling that may be discarded -- or sometimes show code
>
> - when internationalization is hard coded, for different languages
>
> etc etc etc
>
> But branching just because you want to check something in you don't have
> working yet makes little sense.
>
Sure it does. You have something you're implementing (or fixing, or
restructuring, etc) that takes a significant amount of code. You can't check
it in to the main branch, that would break it and inconvenience others. But
you don't want this big chunk of code uncommitted- what if your hard drive
crashed? Or maybe you just want to be able to save this point in time in your
work so you can revert back to it. The easiest way to do it is to make a
branch.
As an example- I had to get a codebase to work on a new compiler. As it
turned out, this ended up with multiple small edits to almost every file. I
couldn't check it in midstream, because it was broken on all platforms at that
time. I couldn't even check it in at the end, because I hadn't even tried to
make sure the other platforms weren't broken. But I had branched, and I could
check in to the branch as needed. In fact, branching allowed me to revert my
own work once or twice, if I had been without revision control on my work it
would have been painful.
In my experience, I'd say about 95% of all branches are due to people
implementing large features on their own branch, then integrating at the end.
Gabe
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