Practical Perforce

Chapter 10. Development Codelines

As you read in Chapter 7, development codelines provide a place to check in incremental work on projects without destabilizing the mainline. In this chapter, we look at creating development codelines, working in development codelines, keeping development codelines up to date, and delivering completed development work into parent codelines.

Tip

With the exception of the mainline, every codeline has a parent; the parent is the codeline it was branched from.

Creating A Development Codeline

Creating a development codeline is a matter of creating a branch view and a master workspace, and using them as branching files. The curator of the development codeline does these things, after deciding what to name the codeline and which modules to branch. First we’ll look at the factors and steps involved in creating a development codeline.

Why a Development Codeline?

The purpose of a development codeline is to isolate potentially disruptive coding and to decouple project schedules. Ideally, we wouldn’t need development codelines—all development would take place in the mainline, and when it was done, we’d make a release. Realistically, we have to isolate projects from the mainline and decouple them from one another because:

• We don’t really know how long it will take to completely code each new feature or behavior. By decoupling the work on them, we can release new software as soon as any of them are done instead of having to wait until they’re all done.

• Interim changes ...