[wp-hackers] Switching from SVN

[Brian Layman]

On 12/10/2010 1:25 AM, Otto wrote:
> In all the corporate environments I've used where a group had "commit"
> access to a central repository, checking something out actually locked
> it, and it stayed locked by that person until they released the lock
> by checking in their changes.
Not where I worked. Occasionally you would lock the database, but that 
was because you couldn't do merges in the core db.

Other than that, it was expected you would do multiple checkins through 
out the day/week.  For example when moving to work with someone in their 
office or in the projector room, you might check in incomplete code.   
The code on your desk was never to be more than 8 hours off from the 
repository and the projects we were given could last weeks or longer, so 
you couldn't practically check in only completed tested code.  Now, it 
was expected that the code would compile and execute at the end of the day.

As a result of this, merges happened all the time. No big deal. 
Additionally, a couple people might split off a branch if the nature of 
their project would affect the operation of the system too much and 
break things for an extended period, until the work was done.  At that 
point we'd merge the branches and almost always it was relatively 
painless. Usually, it was done without any direct intervention as the 
branches were expected to each keep up with the core code.  If there 
were conflicts, with three way differences they were pretty easily resolved.

-Brian