[Building Sakai] Patches vs Branches

[Steven Githens]

Hi Dev,

I'm getting ready to tag some Assignments2 release candidates in 
preparation for tagging a 1.0 soon, and was curious how people felt 
about patches vs branches, specifically how Gradebook2 handles them.

Typically, for most tools we maintain a number of branches for 2.6, 2.7, 
etc etc.  However, I kind of like how Gradebook 2 just has a single 
checkout and then you run the minor patch for your version of Sakai.  If 
there were major changes between versions I could see having seperate 
branches, but if changes are very minor (mostly poms), this seems like a 
nice way to do it. ( I won't lie, I'm also a lazy programmer and don't 
like managing branches ).

I'm curious how deployers feel about this who've installed Gradebook2 
and obviously tons of other Sakai tools.  Does the minor patch cause any 
issues or headaches when deploying, or does it fit in to your workflow 
fairly smoothly?  Any other considerations?   I probably want to start 
rolling tarballs next week.

Maximum cheers,
Steve