First, some background. I work in a fast paced development shop, with a team of very talented engineers. We are currently using CVS to manage our codebase. In the not too distant past, we were actively working on as many as four different branches. Keeping code appropriately syncronized between the various branches was exceedingly difficult. I’ve been working on a little coding in my spare time, and figured now was as good a time as any to educate myself on some of the newer version control systems. I started playing around with GIT, and didn’t really see a clear line towards what I want to accomplish. Bazaar seemed to be explicitly designed to handle several different workflows. Also, it is more similar to CVS than GIT, which can be both good and bad, but things worked a little more like I expected them to with bazaar. Anyway, what do I want to do with version control?
In short I think I’d like to see a main branch, what CVS likes to call HEAD. Several release branches for maintenance, and any number of feature branches. I envision HEAD, and the release branches to be “officially” managed, while developers are more or less free to branch for features as they need to. What this requires, is some sane way to ensure that code reaches HEAD/the appropriate maintenance branch when it’s needed. With as little hell as possible. Merging branches in CVS is an f’ing nightmare.
So, given that I like what I’ve seen from bazaar so far, and a very loose idea of where I want to get, I’m going to start seeing how well bazaar fits. I’ll post what I find.
