Olga Natkovich wrote:
Because for major changes it can break existing functionality and you
don't want to keep things in your local copy till everything works
because you don't get any backup for it.
Nigel said, "attach them to the Jira issue". That's the backup.
I've found that merging is simple when, instead of branching, folks
regularly post revisions of trunk patches to Jira as they develop things
and as trunk changes. But for a large destabilizing changes that
involve many developers, a branch may be warranted.
In my years at Apache I've only used a development branch once: to port
Nutch's core algorithms to the MapReduce platform. We didn't want to
break the trunk, and knew it would take a while to complete this port.
The branch lasted several months.
So I don't yet see a case for single-developer branches, but have found
that branches can be useful for long-term, multi-developer modifications.
Doug
