Bazaar workflow question...

[ckalisiak at attotech.com]

Hello all,

   I have a question for the Bazaar community. We transitioned from VSS to
Bazaar about 18 months ago, with fairly good success, but we're having some
workflow issues, and I was hoping someone might have some suggestions.

Basically we have the following workflow:
1) A single master branch exists which contains all of our common code.
This branch only acts as a container; development and releases are handled
elsewhere.
2) For each planned product/release, the common code is branched, and
development for the product/release is done in the new branch.
3) At various points during the product/release branch's life cycle, merges
between the common code and product/release branches take place, and
revisions need to occasionally be shared between product/release branches
themselves.
4) When a product releases, the final state of the product/release branch
is merged into the common code, and the product/release branch is archived.

We haven't figured out the best way to keep branches synchronized. Both
criss-cross merges and cherrypicking have occasionally resulted in silent
errors being emitted by merge3, weave, and LCA. In one particular set of
product/release branches, all three of the merge algorithms failed, but at
least they failed differently, so the results could be compared. The
silently emitted errors resulted in compiler errors, were fixed, and manual
merges performed to confirm that no other errors were emitted.

In our workflow, what are the best practices to avoid criss-cross merges?
Once a criss-cross has occurred, is there anything we should be doing
besides comparing the results of multiple merge algorithms for correctness?
How should we propagate "point fixes" from one branch to another, as
cherrypicking and reverse-cherrypicking don't seem to be good options for
us? Best case, cherrypicking results in merge conflicts, but worst case,
cherrypicking is where we've seen silent errors. Reverse-cherrypicking
results in lost revisions at the final merge from the product/release
branch to the common code.

Thanks,
Chris

--
Chris Kalisiak
Senior Embedded Systems Engineer
ATTO Technology, Inc.
Phone:  +1.716.691.1999 ext. 274
Fax +1.716.691.9353
"Powering the World's Networks & Storage"