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

[William Deegan]

On 10/11/06, Weintraub, David <david.weintraub at bofasecurities.com> wrote:
> 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.

Is there a technote on this?

> 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...
Unfortunately they don't want to.

-Bill
>
> -----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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