Re:Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer...
by eldavido on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @06:20PM
(#9036366)
I've never encountered this but agree, that can lead to a real hell of branching. Do you dead-end your releases and then backport certain things from your mainline to previous release branches?
Sounds like a headache but probably the best way in certain domains.
Re:Ask HN: Would you hire me (passionate hobbyist programmer...
by pnathan on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @06:38PM
(#9036430)
Yeah, each release might be, e.g, firmware version x.y.z.patchlevel, and then you backport fixes and release on patchlevel.
Some customers demand the absolute minimum amount of change - their interface is essentially fixed, all they want is fixes, no more improvements.
Besides firmware, I think this also get applicable when doing larger whitelabel software, each major customer might want to have a particular version they are focused on using.
Simpler is better; but when your actual code path of support looks like a network, that's the complexity you have to eat - I recommend eating it in your branching system (correspondingly, your versioned artifacts get some really funny version identifiers too. :) ).