On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 09:51:35AM +0100, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> Your mail made me think for a long time about this.
> 
>  From my experience with cvs and other source code control systems, a
> branch is used to get all versions of files that someone has "tagged"
> as being part of a congruent whole.  The problem with this is
> maintenance of the branch, since usually updates to trunk don't affect
> branch, and updates to the branch don't affect the trunk.  We'd gain
> the ability to have known good versions of packages managed together,
> but what I do is use the "checkout at a known time" abilities of cvs
> to allow me to get a snapshot of all the packages at a particular
> point in time, that time to be determined by me using cvs logs.
> 
> So, if we branched, we would double the maintenance overhead by having
> to maintain a branch and a head, and gaining little, since (I think)
> we already have that functionality using cvs. 

But with a branch, you can have code different between branch and trunk.
This may be required if we want a 'stable' package line, only updated
for security fixes (e.g we update a package which depends on different things
in branch or trunk; or something in mk/* was changed which requires 2 version
of the Makefile).

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
--