Question

Has anyone tried using the tofu-scale descriped in Practical Perforce by Laura Wingerd together with svn?

The tofu-scale tells us how to propagate changes between branches (codelines). Changes in stable branches should be merged to less stable branches (firm-to-soft), and changes in the less stable branches should be copied to the stable branches (soft-to-firm). See How Software Evolves

This results in development branches where changes made to more stable branches are being merged, and thus improving code in the development branch bringing in new development and bugfixes.

Figure taken from Practical Perforce (ISBN 10: 0-596-10185-6) http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/136976/tofu%20scale.png

So the question is: Can you do this in svn and if; how do you update from the parent when working on a branch? I know from CVS, that updating from one branch to another gives you a lot of problems when you want to merge your changes back into the parent branch (often being the mainline)

Answer 1

1. Use the standard trunk/, branches/, tags/ structure
2. Use trunk/ as your mainline
3. Create branches for development and release in branches/ – you can distinguish them using a naming convention or even replace branches/ with development/ and release/
4. Use svn merge to perform both merges and copies – read Advanced Merging first