Re: [tlug] Open-source repository question

[Jon Povey <jon@example.com>]

Curt Sampson wrote:
> > John Fremlin writes:

> >  > Even with smaller scale projects (four or five people) it's incredibly 
> >  > useful to be able to branch quickly to make changes that benefit one 
> >  > feature but break a lot of others.
>
> There are some experiments in your codebase you can do all by yourself,
> of course. But for a lot of the significant ones, I find I'm not sure
> whether I've actually made some better sense of the world (or discovered
> something about the world) until I involve a few other people for a few
> days, if not a few weeks. My own private branch won't tell me that. Only
> sharing (usually painfully, if it's any sort of signficant discovery)
> will do so. And the cost of going back, not by a VCS revert command but
> by painfully undoing what you've done, is just part of the risk.

This sounds like you are making a good argument for why branches are 
useful. You create a branch in the VCS for this, other people check it 
out and you work on it together for a while; if you don't like it, you 
go back go trunk. If you do like it, you merge it back in. You can 
involve other people without great pain.

--
Jon Povey
jon@example.com