5.2. Which way to branch

There are many different ways to branch source code. What seems to be the most common method is to use the "trunk", which is the HEAD tag to CVS as the development version, and then make a branch when a stable release is to be made.

That model doesn't fit my development style at the current time, so I use the HEAD default branch as my stable live version, and use other tags (like DEV1 and DEV_REALLY_UNSTABLE) for my development branch.

You may find that you are merging (or "folding") most or all of your development ranch back into your stable branch frequently. This is because unlike traditional programming where products are launched every two or three years with new features, web sites often have little fixes and new features added every day or every few weeks, with new "releases" happening more often than traditional software development (though not all web sites follow that trend). The flexibility is there to branch the source for quite some time to work on a very complex feature or complete redesign before bringing it to the live site, as well as the flexibility for day-to-day updates.