[p4] A few questions about perforce and a specific branching strategy

[Weintraub, David]

Why not simply branch release when they are ready? Never mind... Client
is stuck on this.

You're going to be creating a lot of integrate records in the database,
but as long as we're talking text files, this shouldn't really greatly
increase the depot size. Otherwise, it's pretty much the standard
release branch strategy once you allow the two branches to diverge:
You'd merge down and up.

However, before you get to the point where branches are allowed to
diverge, you'd have to use the seven-step "merge by copy" method to
merge from MAIN to your release branch: Check to make sure there are no
changes on the branch, Integrate (w/ -f flag), Resolve (w/ -at flag),
Revert unchanged, Integrate again, and Resolve again (w/ -at flag), and
finally submit.

Now, the only question I have is do they reuse the same release branch
each time, or do they create a new release branch with each release? If
they reuse the same branch, they'll have problems once they release the
branch and copy over what was there. What if you need to do a bug fix?
You can't use that release branch since you've changed what was on it.

Please tell me they'll use a clean release branch for each release...

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of William Deegan
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 3:09 PM
To: Perforce Users
Subject: [p4] A few questions about perforce and a specific branching
strategy

Greetings,

My client has decided on the following branching strategy.

Two branches:
main     - ongoing development
release - release branch for customers.

1) Once a week they will merge the contents of main to release,
overwriting all files on release.
2) They will stabilize the code in the release branch, and then label
and release to customer.
3) The will then merge put a label on release, and merge all the changes
down to main.
4) Repeat

Note that the merge down to main will likely be happening throughout the
week, but a final merge down will happen before the merge the contents
of main up into release overwriting all the contents of release.

They are concerned about two things:
1) The impact on the size of perforce database of the above strategy
2) How well will perforce handle the merging up and down.
3) Any specific gotchas to watch out for and/or specific command usage
to achieve the above.

I've discussed with them the wisdom of the above strategy and they will
not be deterred, so lets not discuss that.

Thanks,
Bill
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