Branches and Tags and All That

Today, my diligence in creating branches, and then tags, for releases finally paid off. And bit me back.

A product, live at version 28.1, and currently at version 29.2 in User acceptance testing, had a critical bug reported in Build 28.

No problem - I created a branch from the Build 28 tag, checked this out, fixed the bug (one line), and deployed that to the customer. Hooray - happy customer.

However, after creating a new build 28.2 tag, I then had to merge this change back into both the current 29 branch and the trunk, and commit both separately.

I know I would not have been able to support this change without the rigorous tagging/branching, but it still grates when you have to do the same merge more than once.