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

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