[Opensim-dev] to branch or to break?

[Adam Frisby]

I think a lot of the newer SCMs handle three-way merging a lot cleaner 
than diff - although the newer versions of tortoisesvn seem to be 
getting much better at it - I've had few problems in the last few weeks 
other than the un-revert issue.

Adam

Stefan Andersson wrote:
>  > > By that I mean us programmers feel free do fix big things or make big
>  > > restructoring changes when needed without thinking that they can't
>  > > because it will take more than one commit and that means that its
>  > > hard to add half the implementation and still have everything
>  > > working. I actually think this is what most likely lead to Tleiades
>  > > loss (which I am sorry for being the one who did the commit that
>  > > caused him to lose that work), in that he was working on quite big
>  > > changes and it was hard to make commits before it was all finished
>  > > and still leave trunk in a fully working (as much as it every does)
>  > > state. If we said trunk can be broke then he could have made those
>  > > commits.
>  >
>  > Right, though in that interim the physics guys wouldn't have anything
>  > they could test on.
> 
> *sigh*
>  
> 1) Big is bad. Keep your changes small.
> 2) Commit often.
>  
>  > > I really strongly urge us to come up with a way of us being able to
>  > > not feel scared of making changes. Else I worry for the future. I am
>  > > very much in favour of Trunk being the place for active development,
>  > > we just need to get people off the idea of updating to every new
>  > > version of it. And just release "stable versions" in some way
>  > > (tag/branch/ full binary release/whatever) every week or two (or
>  > > three).
>  >
>  > One of the things that might help here would be to look into a
>  > distributed source control system like mercurial. That would make it
>  > very easy to have lots of parallel trees on OpenSim where people could
>  > have all kinds of experimental things going on. It also allows for real
>  > merging.
> 
> Distributed source control seems promising; anybody here has real 
> experience in working on a 15-dev project with it?
>  
> My immediate black hat reaction is that I don't buy the 'merging is 
> easier' bit at all. Diff is still Diff. Also, I'd say that it even makes 
> some merging scenarios even worse, with everybody having to create 
> merges between their own set of patches, that then has to be 
> re-re-merged into the official branch, but maybe it's just me not having 
> any experience with it.
>  
> /Stefan
>  
> 
> 
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