RE: Question regarding change set and release managment

[Arthur Barrett]

Hi Eric,

> Question: multi developers working on different change sets 
> at the same time and we want to have whichever change set 
> pass user acceptance testing move to production first. We 
> don't want to have each change set impact each other since 
> some change set may need to rework several times. To do this 
> I have to create branch for each change set and merge the 
> change set back to chunk after the testing is completed, and 
> then create release tag in trunk for production deployment. 
> If there anyway to do it without branch?

Todd has already supplied a direct answer to your question - my reply is
indirect.

CVS does not have any native support for a user defined 'change set'
(and neither does Subversion).

The CVSNT (NoT CVS) project 'forked' from CVS in 1998 with the intention
of adding features to support SCCM for commercial software developers -
features that for one reason or another would create controversy if
added to the original CVS.

CVSNT has had user defined change sets since 2005 (on windows, unix,
linux etc), they are usually described as 'bug numbers' in the manual.

Whilst it is not strictly technically necessary to have 'user defined
change set' support built into the version control software to implement
the methodology - it sure does make it easier.

Brad Appleton's articles that Todd referred you to are good, but are
showing their age (I think) - the links page was last updated in 1998!

This document is an extract from our commercial variant of CVSNT 'CVS
Suite' and describes working with change sets and promotion models
(PDF):
http://march-hare.com/cvspro/?pdf=u

The main CVSNT web site is:
http://www.cvsnt.org/

Regards,


Arthur Barrett