[cctbxbb] Branches

[Luc Bourhis]

Hi Graeme,

> Quick question - does anyone ever use branches with the CCTBX repository? Just at the moment I'm up to a few things which I would like to be able to commit, but I don't want to break the existing code... however as a project it does not seem CCTBX uses branches much...

There are 2 reasons for branches not being used much:
(a) subversion branches used to be very difficult to use correctly and even nowadays I would not rule out there are still dark corners when it comes to merging
(b) cctbx developers, and especially our beloved overseer for life, is fairly tolerant with *temporary* breakages: as long as you announce coming commits as potentially dangerous, and you have tested at least on one of the Linux test machine, and you fix any problem within a few days, then we will be more than happy to cope.
However, if you envision that your coding adventures are going to span several dozen commits, a good fraction of which you may eventually throw away, then, the trunk may not be the right place to work. If you are unsure, feel free to discuss the matter here or directly with our beloved overseer for life. 

My personal solution to this problem is to keep a local git mirror of the subversion repository on my machine and to heavily use branches in there. In my humble opinion, this is a superior solution because git is so much better at branching and merging than subversion. Eventually I may end up pushing several dozen of commits to sourceforge in one go because I have tested on a handful of machines, using git to keep it all in sync. this is far superior a working pattern than using subversion. Note that you could substitute mercurial instead of git in that paragraph of mine without changing the conclusions.

Best wishes,

Luc