[p4] Changelist-at-a-time VS bulk integration

[Chuck Karish]

On 12/20/06, Leonard, William C <bill.leonard at intergraph.com> wrote:
> This is a very interesting discussion.  I would especially be interested
> if any of the posters is willing to share their automation of by-change
> integration.
>
> We mostly do the by-change integration, but it has been very problematic
> for us.  Each developer is responsible for integrating an original
> change to any "following" release branches and to the main branch.  The
> two biggest problems are:
> (1) developers forget to integrate their changes, and
> (2) developers integrate "out of order", resulting in messy (and
> sometimes incorrect) merges.
>
> Sometimes problem 2 is a result of problem 1, but it can also occur
> simply because developers work at different rates.  With 30+ developers,
> it's impossible to coordinate this effectively.
>
> Hence, we have toyed with the idea of either automating some of the
> process, or changing to a bulk integration scheme.  We've experimented
> with bulk integration on one of our development baselines, where we did
> an integration from the main baseline (to pick up recent bug fixes from
> older releases) weekly.  This actually seemed to work pretty well.  If
> conflicts needed to be resolved, we typically got the developer who made
> the original change to help.  We rotated the integration duty, to share
> the load.
>
> I can see, though, that this might not work as well for release
> baselines when you're under pressure.

A solution suggests itself:  Do a batch integration to catch up your
release branch to the feature-complete point, then integrate only
those individual changes that are needed to fix the product for
release.


-- 
Chuck Karish   karish at well.com   (415) 317-0182