SVN - 1 trunk and only 1 development branch strategy?

Question

Is this branching and merging strategy good in SVN?

Trunk - No body changes any files here directly.
Development branch - The only branch where all development will happen. At the time of project release, this branch will be merged into trunk. Build will then happen on trunk and given for QA, UAT, PROD

My questions are:

1. Will the merge be incremental? Meaning, after Merge-1 is done, during Merge-2, will only delta be taken between Merge-1 and Merge-2?
2. Is this strategy good or any problems like conflict during subsequent merging?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Will the merge be incremental? Meaning, after Merge-1 is done, during Merge-2, will only delta be taken between Merge-1 and Merge-2?

Yes it will. We do same strategy (with a lot of branches) and we are happy. Was a long way to get to this point.

Is this strategy good or any problems like conflict during subsequent merging?

From my point of view - like I mentioned above - this is best way (for us) avoid hard merging. Time before we do things like branches form branches and reintegrated in trunk, but this was more hard. If we want to update a branch B with features form a other branch A we merge branch A to trunk an trunk to B. If B is finished we merge back to trunk. This works fine.

Answer 2

Follow-up to Micha

• Development in parallel in one mainline with more than 2 developers maybe troublesome some day
• Trunk as pure target of merges haven't a much sense: each mergeset in it is just some tag (and we have /tags for this task)