Subversion - should anyone be developing off the trunk?

Question

When using Subversion, should developers be working off the trunk or should the trunk be only used for merges from each individual developer\'s branch and watched by a conti

Answer 1

There's an argument to be made that developers should be required to work on trunk.

If you let them branch off, some will be tempted to maintain those branches indefinitely and cross-sync with trunk at regular intervals. This will inevitably lead to complicated merge operations, and these in turn produce bugs.

By forcing everyone onto trunk, they have to keep pretty close to the head, so there will be less risk of bugs being introduced with bad merges. Also, since everyone runs up-to-date code, they're more likely to notice bugs as they creep up, and fixes will get committed faster.

Ofcourse, sometimes a large feature needs to be staged separately, but in those cases a specially approved exception can be made.