Branching Practices

[Rojal Pradhan]

I have the following situation and would appreciate suggestions.

·       Developers are working on a bug-fix branch or the release branch.

·       We set aside say 20 fixes to be done for the next maintenance release.

·       Construction ends and fixes are ready for testing.

·       We lockdown all commits until the testing is complete, reworked, verified for release.

·       However, next 20 fixes are lined up for the same branch. But the developers cannot commit until we get done with testing.

·       To reduce the lockdown time, we are looking into creating more branches.

o       Is it better to create a branch at the end of first fixes?

§       This could allow developers to work on the second set of fixes.

§       However, if testing finds issue with the first set, a fix will have to be committed, which could be included in the release by moving the tags.

§       Potential is there that the fix could use new set of code from the second round of fixes that would not be in the release.

o       Or branch at the point of origin where the bug-fix branch started. This will force me to have a branch per maintenance release.

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Rojal Pradhan

Ontario Systems, LLC.

765-751-7186

address@hidden