Bad Advices: Keep trunk pristine

So what's wrong with this simple advice?

Well, it assumes there is a trunk, it designates it in advance. Now, your system has a bottleneck, a single resource the state of which governs the state of your whole system!

How sad! You have slipped into the /main/LATEST syndrome!

What prevents you from designing your default state, your best one, the one you offer for universal consumption, afterwards, e.g. with a label? In a way you can lightly, easily, securely undo, or modify? Why hardcoding it in advance?

This defeats in fact most of the interest of using branches at all! Branches free you from locking all other users while you enter a phase of potential instability. Preparing to merge back jeopardizes all this benefit!

So: no trunk. Take this advice backwards: make your "trunk" what you have most pristine.

-- MarcGirod - 22 Aug 2008