From: Mike Schwab Date: 2007-03-21T18:30:29+09:00 Subject: Re: Why SVN? > Professionally, I use subversion, though my team is looking to migrate > to something that does a better job at branch management and merging. I have been thinking a lot about this too; the rule about not checking in broken code seems to mitigate some of the agility that I'd like to have. If I make progress and check in a branch, then I can delete what I damn please in my further attempts to get it working. I will always have those revisions to start from if it turns out my deleting was too hasty. If I keep it local until it's passing tests, I don't have that (but I can often approximate it by commenting lines out). I plan to do a lot of branching for this reason. I have noticed, though, that it is done somewhat sparingly in many of the repos I've seen. Perhaps this is primarily related to project maturity, software type, community circumstances. But I wonder if open source would be that much more agile if the casual branching I described was more common. It could be a bit like putting heads together to get it working, begging feedback and brainstorm at more steps along the way, rather than waiting until the code works to check in. Conversely, if branching and merging is difficult enough that this luxury would rather slow down the team, does the issue seem like one that can be addressed in a future release, or is it an unavoidable consequence of svn's other features? Mostly rhetorical here. Last thing. svn has a new sync feature. Does this make it [more] usable as a distributed repo? -Mike [-just got hired through workingwithrails.com; extremely humbled to join the ranks of professional rubyists!] -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.