Workflow: How to best land changes on a trunk?

[Ian Clatworthy]

Max Bowsher wrote:

> What's the best (easiest) way for these developers to land their
> branches onto trunk?
> 
> Requiring that all developers have a pristine local trunk branch
> (possibly bound), is a possible option, but I'd like to check I haven't
> overlooked anything before I start attempting to make recommendations to
> my colleagues.

I'd certainly start there. Trivial changes can be made and committed
from their trunk branch. Bigger changes should be developed in feature
branches and merged into trunk when ready. I find this mix of
centralised and distributed VC very productive and use it whenever I can.

BTW, if a developer starts working in trunk and realises the change is
larger than initially thought, then:

  bzr branch trunk fix-123
  cd fix-123
  bzr merge --uncommitted ../trunk

That will effectively transfer the (uncommitted) edits into a feature
branch. (At some later time, you may want to run 'bzr revert' in trunk
to restore it to a pristine state.)

HTH,
Ian C.