[Anthill] Do I need Branching, or Is labeling/Tagging Sufficient

[Dunbar, Michael]

Thanks for the replies. It seems that 'branch per release' is a good idea. Next question: How to achieve this in PVCS? All the PVCS docs talk about branching at the file level, so I'm wondering how to branch the entire project, so I can then tell Anthill (or, worst case, manually extract & do) 'build the latest revisions in this branch'. Will a label come into play here?

Thanks,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: anthill-bounces at caladin.urbancode.com
[mailto:anthill-bounces at caladin.urbancode.com]On Behalf Of Hansen,
Richard (Rick) (TLR Corp)
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 10:27 AM
To: Anthill user list
Subject: RE: [Anthill] Do I need Branching, or Is labeling/Tagging
Sufficient


You are on the right track with creating a maintenance or "release" branch. Creating a branch for each release is a common scm practice. I highly recommend the book "Pragmatic Version Control" by Thomas and Hunt. You can read about it at.

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/starter_kit/vc/index.html

Here a couple other good links. 

http://www.perforce.com/perforce/bestpractices.html
http://www.cmcrossroads.com/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: anthill-bounces at caladin.urbancode.com
> [mailto:anthill-bounces at caladin.urbancode.com]On Behalf Of Dunbar,
> Michael 
> Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 9:16 AM
> To: anthill at caladin.urbancode.com
> Subject: [Anthill] Do I need Branching, or Is labeling/Tagging
> Sufficient
> 
> 
> I'd like to hear what techniques you've found successful for 
> fixing bugs in a previous release while simultaneously
> 
> a) Working on the next release
> b) Propagating the bug fix to the next release
> c) Not propagating new code with bug fixes for the previous release
> 
> I'm currently labeling each build (thanks to Anthill), but 
> I'm wondering if I need to make use of branching (one for the 
> previous release, one for next release) as well. The way we 
> did this at the my last job feels to manual, and error prone:
> 
> 1) Fix the bug in the main/only branch
> 2) Extract all files with revision label (or date) of previous release
> 3) Extract the current revisions for the file(s) containing 
> the bug fix, overwriting the versions obtained in step 2.
> 4) Run the build script.
> 
> The big problem I see is that the collection of versions that 
> I've just assembled has no label/tag, or easy way to get back 
> to it if another bug is found. It seems like it would be 
> cleaner to have a maintenance branch for the previous 
> release, where all changes were immediately merged to the 
> main branch. The point of the branch would be to not pick-up 
> changes for the next release, while maintaining the latest 
> bug fix versions of the previous release. I'm hoping it would 
> then be a one-step/automated process to 'build maintenance 
> branch', by supplying a label or something else to denote 
> what revisions to build. I want to leverage Anthill for these 
> maintenance builds, just as I do for my current release builds.
> 
> Does this sound right, or can I achieve what I'm aiming for 
> with the current labels/tags Anthill's been assigning without 
> branching? I use PVCS, in case that impacts your answer.
> 
> Any Input Greatly Appreciated,
> Mike
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