I am implementing a TFS branching structure where there is a MAIN integration branch, a Production branch which contains code released to production, and a Development branch. Both Dev and Prod are branched off Main.
Any concurrent development will be done on sub-branches which will be branched off the Development branch and I would like any changes made to the regular Development branch to merge back to the sub branches as required. I can’t see any way to automate merges but one thing I thought of was having a nightly or weekly diff process that looks at the two branches and sends an email report of differences between say the Development branch and each Sub Branch.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this and if there are any products I could use to do the auto-diff and report emailing?
Thanks
This would depend on the expected stability of the DEV branch. However, a rather straightforward solution is a CI build on the DEV branch that sends a notification email when it succeeds to the people who need to forward integrate from it.
This however, seems a bit of a hack to me as in all likelihood this CI build is going to be triggered at least once a day. Which means that the email notification will become spam. Why not just have the first thing developers do when they start for the day be forward integrate from the parent branch? This keeps the merges small, so resolving the conflicts should be fairly straightforward.
If two branches are constantly merging, you probably don’t need the child branch.
Anyways, a CI build with a email notification on success will get you what you’ve asked for. Every time the branch changes, everyone is notified.