Hi,
I'm working with our Web Team to re-engineer their development process. All the
code is already under Subversion, but everything is in one big directory.
They're not using any branch or tags for that matter. And of course, testing is
not as rigorous and controlled as it should be. Anyway, I have suggested the
usual trunk/branches/tags layout.
Developers will normally work on branches, but can occasionally work directly
on trunk for easy and quick fixes. The tester will create a QA branch as a copy
of trunk at a specific revision. When they are happy that a QA is ready for
releasing, a tag is created from the QA (or maybe from trunk again at the same
revision).
I think they will go for such a solution, even though it means that they cannot
pick-and-choose what to test. If they want to test a bug fixed in revision
1000, they will also test all bugs fixed in previous revision.
The problem is that they may want to fast track an urgent bug fix. It shouldn't
happen often, but it may happen so I need to come up with a solution for that
case too.
What I'm thinking is something like the following. Let's supposed that 1.1 is
the latest release, i.e. it's what's in production.
i) the developer creates a branch off the tag
svn cp http://<URL TO REPO>/tags/1.1 http://<UR TO
REPO>/branches/1.1_urgent_fix -m"Creating branch fro urgent bug 123456"
ii) the developer makes all the necesary, coding and testing
iii) the fix is merged back to trunk
cd trunk
svn merge ^/branches/1.1_urgent_fix .
svn ci -m"Fixing urgent bug 123456"
iv) the branch goes live
svn cp http://<URL TO REPO>/branches/1.1_urgent_fix http://<URL TO
REPO>/tags/1.2 -m"Fixed bug 123456"
switch the production site to point to ^/tags/1.2
v) at this point all the QA are useless because the do not contain the urgent
fix, so a new QA must be created
svn cp -rHEAD http://<URL TO REPO>/trunk http://<URL TO
REPO>/tags/QA_1.3_1 -m"Created first QA for 1.3"
Now my questions.
1 - Do you have any comments on the process and/or any suggestions?
2 - Would the merge, in step iii, do the right thing and merge all revisions
committed into the branch into trunk? I can't use --reintegrate becuase I
haven't previously merged from trunk to the branch (as the branch was created
as a copy of a tag).
3 - I don't really like the fact that after the fix has gone live, we are
forced to create a QA from HEAD, which means testing everything that has gone
into trunk, but I can't think of another way to make sure the fix is indeed
included in the Qas and especially in the next (1.3 in this case) release.
Thank you in advance.
Giulio
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