What branching strategy should I use during the development/maintenance of a web application?

Question

I am trying to decide on the best branching strategy for a web application project. Here is what I have come up with until now and I would greatly appreciate any comments an

Answer 1

If you only have one release live at any time, and you do all development in a single feature branch, then these approaches are effectively the same.

If branch-by-feature to you means having a several branches on the go at once, i'd avoid it like the plague. More branches means more merging, which is a pain in itself, and more integration hell. It's far better to do continuous integration to a single codeline.

If your deployment process is any more involved than branch, test, go live, then an advantage of branch-by-release is that you can have multiple release branches going at once, in different phases: one live and being bugfixed as necessary, and another one being stabilised, tested, going through acceptance, etc, while development continues on the trunk. If you have a live trunk, on the other hand, once you merge a feature branch in with a view to taking it live, you've lost your ability to do bugfixes to the current live system. The feature branch merge becomes a point of no return.