On 20/08/2008, Christian Larsen <contact@dword.dk> wrote:
The more I read about how you manage the repository, the more I wonder why you don't do like most projects I have been working with. Maybe that is what you are doing, but I can't get my head around it. ;)
[snip explanation] The main obstacle is testing. We need the feedback from the regression testing to tell if our code works on the large number of platforms and compilers. It seems to be easier to run the tests on two fixed branches. There's some talk of new testing systems which might be more flexible. There also doesn't seem to be anyone willing to maintain the extra branches or point releases. And some boost developers don't seem very keen on working with multiple branches. If we had a culture of shared code ownership, we might be able to make up for that.
AFAIK new versions of Subversion even helps manage this merging nightmare by automatically keeping track of exactly which revisions from e.g. trunk are merged into each of the other branches. You might want to look into that feature. If an older version of Subversion is used (pre 1.5 I think), then a tool such as svnmerge might help.
We're upgrading to 1.5 this week, but I don't think we're going to upgrade the repository format for a while. I've been using svnmerge, but I'm in the minority. The merge data on the release branch is pretty useless because most most developers aren't using it (some seem to actively dislike it). Daniel