Use of CVS

Doug Hardie bc979 at lafn.org
Thu Jan 11 19:56:18 UTC 2007


I have a medium sized application where the source is all in a CVS  
repository.  Basically it works great as I am able to retrieve any  
previous version of a module when needed.  Most of the changes to the  
application are quickly resolved, CVS committed and the production  
system updated in less than a day.  Recently, I made a fairly large  
update to the application that took about 4 weeks to complete.   
During that time I was not able to fix small problems as there was no  
way to update the production system without incorporating a large  
number of changes from the new update that were just not working  
yet.  Basically all small corrections were made to the new system but  
not incorporated into the production system until the new stuff was  
completed.  There were no real problems from this, but it was not  
really convenient.

Now I am going to be embarking on a revision that will take about 6  
months to complete.  Obviously I will not be able to wait till the  
completion to fix minor problems.  So I am going to need to do  
something with branches.  I have dug through the man pages and  
believe that is the best approach.  However, given that I need to  
maintain the current version with a probably small number of fixes  
during the development process what is the best approach?  Should I  
branch off the production version as a new branch and keep the main  
one for the new development or the other way around.  Will it be  
easier to merge the fixes to the production branch back in to the new  
system later or should those fixes be made to both branches at the  
same time?  Any suggestions on these approaches will be appreciated.   
Thanks,

-- Doug


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