Re: [tlug] Open-source repository question

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-07-23 12:32 +0900 (Thu), Jon Povey wrote:

> Curt Sampson wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> 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.

Except for the fact that they're currently working in the trunk and so,
to work with this, they need to stop, commit, switch to the branch, and
work there instead. But if everybody does this, what was the point of the
branch, anyway, except to make more work when it comes time to merge back
into the trunk?

For certain sorts of very large, wild-and-crazy-experimental kind of
changes, where there's a reasonable probability that you want to throw
it all away, I can see using a branch. But in most cases changes aren't
like that. (Or, if you frequently want to throw away reasonably large
amounts of work, you may want to re-think how you develop software.)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com