branching HOW(NOT)TO

Just a short note on branching. If you are thinking about creating a branch, you should know that branching/merging is one of the weakest parts of CVS.

For branching I would like to establish the following conventions. For branch "foo" there will be a static FOO_BASE tag that marks the beginning of the branch, and development will be done using the FOO_BRANCH tag. The static tag is crucial for later merging.

Using all caps is ugly but helps to distinguish between directory names and tags names on the command line. (This is a weak protection, but helps when you're playing with tags at 3am in the morning.)

- Mike.