At $Job, I am admonished, "Always develop in a branch. Never develop in trunk." So when I recently earned commit privileges to the Parrot subversion repository, one of the first things I did was to create a branch in which to work on my refactoring of some of Parrot's build tools written in Perl 5.

The problem is: I'm spending too much time maintaining the branch. I seek the wisdom of the monks in figuring out how to use Subversion branches most expeditiously.

Let me describe the problem more precisely. At any given time, I'm taking a script executed by make and located in the tools/build/ directory, extracting its functionality into a new module placed in the lib/Parrot/ directory, and writing a test suite placed in the t/tools/ directory. While testing the new module's subroutines, I also have need to read source code such as ops files found in the src/ops/ directory.

That may sound complex, but it really amounts to only a half of one percent of all the files and directories in the Parrot source tree. So of all the files in my buildtools branch, 0.5% are there so that they don't hurt anything in trunk, while 95.5% might just as well be identical to the files in trunk -- which means that I would like to keep them in synch with trunk as much as possible. (After all, a change in one of those files might affect the outcome of the tests.)

After reviewing the Subversion book, the only way I've found to accomplish this is this:

  1. In my branch, call svn update to determine the version (let's call the revision n).

  2. Call svn merge -r 16803:n  https://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk, where 16803 is the revision at which my branch was created.

  3. Ideally, at this point I call svn commit and everything updates nicely. But in practice, I get all kinds of conflicts which have little immediate significance but which must be resolved for a commit to succeed. Examples: changes in file properties; conflicts in the MANIFEST. In other words, things that waste my time and don't make development in my branch any easier.

In other words, I want to keep my branch reasonably up-to-date so that I can be assured that my own files will eventually commit to trunk correctly -- but I don't want to spend 15 minutes a night resolving spurious conflicts in the branch. How can I do this most effectively?

Thank you very much.

Jim Keenan

In reply to [OT] Best Use of Subversion Branches in Perl Development by jkeenan1

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.