How to manage branches?

[Markus Karg <ma...@quipsy.de>]

We're using SVN in a small team for several weeks now.
In the meantime there are a lot of branches and we need to know, which branch already merged, and which not.
I know that in the SVN book there is a tip that we shall type in the branch as a comment when merging.
This is good to know what is already in the trunk, but there are two open problems:
(a) There is stall a lot of branches in the 'branches' folder. Actually there are so much branches that we tend to have no more overview. We don't want to remove the branches since we might need them in future (e. g. to merge into another branch), but actually having 50 branches in that folder is not concise.
(b) How to *fast* get a list of branches that had not been merged into trunk?
 
How do YOU handle this?
We're glad for every tip! :-)
 
Markus

Re: How to manage branches?

[Ryan Schmidt <su...@ryandesign.com>]

On Oct 17, 2005, at 12:17, Markus Karg wrote:

> We're using SVN in a small team for several weeks now.
> In the meantime there are a lot of branches and we need to know,  
> which branch already merged, and which not.
> I know that in the SVN book there is a tip that we shall type in  
> the branch as a comment when merging.
> This is good to know what is already in the trunk, but there are  
> two open problems:
> (a) There is stall a lot of branches in the 'branches' folder.  
> Actually there are so much branches that we tend to have no more  
> overview. We don't want to remove the branches since we might need  
> them in future (e. g. to merge into another branch), but actually  
> having 50 branches in that folder is not concise.
> (b) How to *fast* get a list of branches that had not been merged  
> into trunk?
>
> How do YOU handle this?
> We're glad for every tip! :-)


You are apparently talking about feature branches. We have only used  
one feature branch in our projects so far, just to see if we  
understood how to use them. We haven't need to use them since the test.

We do use release branches.

We move our old braches to a directory branches/old when we're done  
with them. That way only the active branches are directly in the  
branches directory.

You can look through the svn log of each of your feature branches to  
determine if they have already been merged with the trunk, and if so,  
move it to the branches/old directory. This is a tedious manual  
process; I don't know of a way to do it more quickly or automatically.



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org