Creating a release branching cycle with shared projects

Question

We're a small/medium team that previously used a fairly simple system of branching which utilises SVN's redbooks recommended practice - unstable trunk for current development, with branches off that for work taking longer then a day etc.

I've recently implemented a change that I've unfortunately realized is just wrong, but I'm stumped how to do this properly.

This project is now going to be used in the source of multiple teams - now I know there is a school of thought that the binaries should be exposed rather then the source, but this is not an option - this will be included via externs as each team will need to make active changes to the source.

To enact this, I proposed the following:

• Trunk will not be for active development
• Each team will have their own "main development" branch - this effectively is what was previously trunk.
• For the smaller project work items, each team takes a branch off their "main development" branch.

So, when a development cycle is complete, each team will reintegrate their "main dev" branch into trunk, whereby other teams can merge in when they desire (giving them stability), and then a new "main dev" branch is created for the next cycle.

EG, the below is the layout of the branches (not the physical layout) - so each team takes a branch off trunk for their teams development branch, and a branch off that for each members working branch:

--Trunk
    \  TeamAMainDev1
           \ PRJ1-teama
    \  TeamBMainDev1
           \ PRJ1-teamb

The problem is, some branches need to stay around longer then their parent MainDev branch. Once their parent gets integrated into Trunk, and a new MainDev is created, the merges obviously don't work. So if there was a new TeamAMainDev2 branch, trying to merge that onto PRJ1-teama causes tree conflicts etc etc - which does make sense obviously; I had thought SVN will know the change on MainDev1 was in PRJ1, but since it needs to merge the entire reintegration from MainDev1, this doesn't work.

How do others handle this? To have multiple branches off branches, that need constant merges from their parent to be up to date, but may be re-integrated onto another parent. Or what process would other people recommend?

Help me OB1.

Answer 1

If anyone else needs to do something similiar, here is what I found:

In Tortoise, there is an option to "merge two different branches" - so simply select the previous one, and the one before, and this will detect any changes not from both, and add the differences.

That works for the above scenario.