Even better in many ways is Brad Streamed lines web pages. Does and
excellent job of not only laying out branching idioms but goes into the
trade off and situations that lead to the need for many of the idioms.

I still have emotional scars from working with a team using VSS as after
months of working on changing the culture to try branching we learned
that branching broke the projects themselves since the project file also
stored VSS info and had to be hand edited to fix!

As a compromise I came up with a system whereby we used a floating label
to indicate that code was ready for integration and did scheduled builds
off of that label. If successful, apply another label to indicate last
good build.

In this way it is a simulated branch and can help to build a
relationship with the developers and get your foot in the door as far as
winning their heart and minds. It also puts you in a position to
identify milestones and baselines and only branching as needed for OM
work. I'm not saying it is the best solution on merit alone but your
battle is more than a technical one.


===
-Curt
W: 860.702.9059
M: 860.881.2050

-----Original Message-----
From: scm-patterns@yahoogroups.com [mailto:scm-patterns@yahoogroups.com]
On Behalf Of Will Sargent
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 12:54 PM
To: scm-patterns@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [scm-patterns] Looking for opinions on SCM best practices

> I'm working on a project in which SCM is mostly limited to source
> code access control using MS SourceSafe. My manager (in case he reads
> this) is great at managing people, but he doesn't have a technical
> (software engineering) background so when arguments flare up, he
> doesn't necessarily know who is right.

Your best bet is to get some books. If you have "Software Configuration
Management Patterns" then that goes a long way to talking about good
practices. You could also try Pragmatic Source Control, and I believe
there's some information on wikipedia as well.
If you put together a presentation using the books as reference, that
should go a long way to convincing your manager.

The practices you're talking about are fairly well established, but
because they're so well established, people don't tend to talk about
them all that much.


Will.



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