Branch: Yes ! Merge: No!

I'll try to describe and advocate here a novel branching strategy. This builds on ClearCase, and is valid mostly in the context of support available from it. It may or may not apply to other contexts. It does require specific support from tools, which I intend to produce and publish as a cleartool wrapper.

• Advantages and standard use of Branches
  • Labeling Patterns
• Do not merge back to upper branches
• Do not allow cascading
• So... Branch Off /main/0!

This strategy is very general, but one may consider applying it first to the case of tools management, for the following reasons:

• (third party) tools are often made of large binaries, which
  • do not merge (thus, full copies are made), and
  • are expensive to duplicate (needlessly growing the size of vobs, the time to synchronize replicas, etc.)
• the config record of derived objects heavily depends on them.

(See also Branches FAQ).

-- MarcGirod - 21 Sep 2007