How to manage feature and maintenance branches and merging?

[jchronakis]

Hi,

I would like to know if anyone has experience on how to use mantis to track feature and maintenance branches and in the first case how merging could work. I can think of two approaches but I lack the experience to judge which one is more suitable and I worry a lot about merging the issues of a feature branch to the trunk after the actual merge on the version control system.

My first idea was to represent both feature and maintenance branches as versions. But this seems wrong because of the linear nature of versions. I don't expect the roadmap and changelog to work well with this.

I am now thinking of representing the branches as different projects. So I will have:

Code: Select all

- main branch,         feature branch,              maintenance branch
- myproject-main,   myproject-newfeature,              myproject-1.5
- 1.6-b1            1.6-newfeature-trunk                   1.5
- 1.6-b2            1.6-newfeature-final                   1.5.1
- 1.6-b3              <-- merge                            1.5.2
...

From other forum posts, I think that the maintenance branch can work well and any common issues can be cloned and tracked separately.

I worry about merging the feature branch to the trunk. From another forum post (http://www.mantisbt.org/forums/viewtopi ... ects#p6601), moving the issues of the feature branch project to the the main project and then I will have a nice history with everything.

I am not sure what will happen with versions, since versions on feature branch were named differently, but i hope I can batch process the merged issues and fit them to the right reported/fixed version.

Does anyone have any similar experience? Do you have any better ideas or corrections?

Thank you

Y.