Copying tags?

["Echlin, Jamie" <ja...@credit-suisse.com>]

Afternoon,

We've enforced a rule whereby tags cannot be copied. I know this sounds
backwards but I need some help in justifying it.

The reason why we're preventing it is because it's not clear where to
merge back to, and in fact encourages merging back to the tag, which is
also blocked.

What we're telling people to do, in the event of a bug where they need
to make a patch to a released version, is find the rev the tag was
created from, then branch whatever branch the tag was created from at
that rev. Then when the work is finished they can merge back to the
parent, if necessary.

Of course this only works if the tag was created from a rev and not a
working copy, but we're enforcing that too.

Sound reasonable, or are we being too cautious?

Cheers, jamie



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RE: Copying tags?

["Echlin, Jamie" <ja...@credit-suisse.com>]

> Sounds overly cautious to me. And what happens if the branch 
> you tagged from is ended?

Well, they could still branch from the branch that has ended, just not
merge back there without resurrecting it.

We have a complicated hierarchy of branches, and it seems like the
concensus advice is to try to respect the hierarchy of branches when
merging, ie 4.1.1 should merge to 4.1, to 4, to trunk...

Branching from a tag just seems to allow the possibility of a merge to
the wrong place, or one of the intermediate branches getting skipped.

Cheers, jamie


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Re: Copying tags?

[Andy Levy <an...@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 08:47, Echlin, Jamie
<ja...@credit-suisse.com> wrote:
> Afternoon,
>
> We've enforced a rule whereby tags cannot be copied. I know this sounds
> backwards but I need some help in justifying it.
>
> The reason why we're preventing it is because it's not clear where to merge
> back to, and in fact encourages merging back to the tag, which is also
> blocked.
>
> What we're telling people to do, in the event of a bug where they need to
> make a patch to a released version, is find the rev the tag was created
> from, then branch whatever branch the tag was created from at that rev. Then
> when the work is finished they can merge back to the parent, if necessary.
>
> Of course this only works if the tag was created from a rev and not a
> working copy, but we're enforcing that too.
>
> Sound reasonable, or are we being too cautious?

Sounds overly cautious to me. And what happens if the branch you
tagged from is ended?

What I have done in the past is to copy the "flawed" tag to a branch,
make my changes in the branch, then merge back to trunk. My process
starts w/ code changes in trunk, then creates tags each time I promote
to an environment; trunk to developer testing, developer testing to
integration testing, integration testing to production.