Re: Practice: Single Code Base

Hi Andrew!

Andrew McDonagh wrote:
> On our product, we have to maintain 'at least' one version prior to the
> latest version. Shortly before we had to start our second version, I 
> looked at most/all of the various techniques (Brad's book is excellent
> for helping here) and quickly came to the conclusion you are referring
> to above - one code base is a lot easier and safer than a multitude of
> them. It took some selling to management, but I pushed for and won
> branching to be done during build and runtime.
> 
> We are now onto our sixth version, using the same original code base -
> we can still build each of the six versions today from the same
> mainline, just by setting the desired version before starting the
> release build.

Thanks for the story (and the praise of the book :)

> There is a trade off, the 'branch'ing still exists, albeit in code
> rather than SCM, and so its just as possible to introduce bugs into one
> version but not another.  However, this is largely mitigated by because
> we can build and test each of them at the same time from a single source
> code base, rather than having to use the SCM tool's branching support.

Can you say more about what it means for the branching to be "in code 
rather than SCM" ? I didnt entirely understand and want to learn more 
about it.

-- 
Brad Appleton <brad-777BKhlmzsrR7s880joybQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> www.bradapp.net
    Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com)
    Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
"And miles to go before I sleep" --Robert Frost