Shelving and Branching
Team System offers an interesting "shelving" feature.
Shelving lets you set aside any pending changes you've made to the source into a named shelveset. Once shelved, those changes are isolated from the main source tree. But that shelveset can be ..
- shared with other users
- worked on locally
- integrated back into the source tree
.. at will. It's a handy feature!
Evidently the Shelving feature is very popular with the Team System development group at Microsoft:
[Shelving is] amazingly simple to use and as soon as the concept 'clicks', people start seeing how handy it is. It's become wildly popular for creating "fix ready" changesets for DCRs, bugs that need approval before checkin, feature work in progress but not ready to be committed, etc. I'm not sure the typical version control user is comfortable enough with branches to deal with many such branches being out there that they might want to interact with, particularly when they may be organized along multiple lines (by user for work in progress, by feature area for DCRs and bug fixes, perhaps).
Shelving in Team System is equivalent to creating a private branch in Subversion, as outlined in this post by Mike Mason:
- Whilst working on adding the new “frobscottle” feature Alice decides she’d like to shelve her current working copy changes. Her project is checked out from
svn://svn.acme.com/project/trunk.
- Needing somewhere to store her changes, Alice branches the trunk to create
svn://svn.acme.com/project/shelves/alice/frobscottle.
- Alice uses the Subversion switch command to switch her working copy from the trunk to the new frobscottle branch. When switching, Subversion preserves any changes you’ve made to the working copy.
- Alice checks in her working copy. The changes will be safely stored under the shelves directory.
- Alice switches her working copy back to the trunk and works on something else. In future if she wants the shelved frobscottle changes she can merge from the branch to her trunk working copy, then commit the changes back into the main code line.
As you can see, Subversion relies pretty heavily on path conventions, such as
/project/trunk
/project/trunk/shelves/
/project/trunk/shelves/username/
When you set up a project in Subversion, you're supposed to manually create these root-level folders:
/project/trunk
/project/tags
/project/branches
Trunk is where the main body of your project code goes; tags and branches are simply straight copies of the tree with labels attached.