Thursday 13 February 2014

Mainline vs. Trunk Development

In software source control (git, mercurial, etc.) you branch the code base in order to isolate different development efforts from one another. In a "mainline" source control model fixes are made on the branches and then merged into the mainline. In a "trunk" source control model fixes are made on the single trunk and then pulled into the branches as needed for a release.
Paul Hammant provides a nice picture of this in which he expresses his preference for the trunk model here: http://paulhammant.com/images/mainline_vs_trunk.png

No comments: