Branching and Merging - Introduction

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Branching allows for the concurrent development of projects. Branching allows users to work on files in parallel, and then merge the changes to the main development trunk.

Branching is useful in the following scenarios:

·

A product is released and normal development continues. A customer complains about a bug. Normally, you would not want to fix a bug on the main development trunk, since the revision under development is considered unstable. Branching allows you to solve this problem. Open a branch at the point of the original release. Fix the bug on this branch, which is considered a stable source, and ship a new version to the customer. Later, merge this bug fix into the main development trunk.

·

There is a major feature that part of the team wants to develop in a stable environment. Branching and merging provide a stable environment and allow you to merge all changes made to the main development trunk.

·

A new version of a purchased source-code package is available. Branching and merging allows you to easily merge the manufacturer development with your improvements.

         
CS-RCS supports any number of branches (including nested branches) and multiple merging of branches to the trunk.

Note: This chapter is only applicable for the Pro edition of CS-RCS.