Shelves in Subversion
Here is an informative post on how to create “shelves” using Subversion, similar to a feature available in Visual Studio Team System.
Shelve your pending changes when you are not ready to or cannot check in a set of pending changes. There are primarily five shelve scenarios:
- Interrupt When you have pending changes that are not ready for check in but you need to work on a different task, you can shelve your pending changes to set them aside.
- Integration When you have pending changes that are not ready for check in but you need to share them with another team member, you can shelve your pending changes and ask your team member to unshelve them.
- Review When you have pending changes that are ready for check-in and have to be code-reviewed, you can shelve your changes and inform the code reviewer of the shelveset.
- Backup When you have work in progress that you want to back up, but are not ready to check in, you can shelve your changes to have them preserved on the Team Foundation server.
- Handoff When you have work in progress that is to be completed by another team member, you can shelve your changes to make a handoff easier.
The branching model in Subversion, with its use of “cheap copies” is well suited to provide similar capabilities and handle all five of these scenarios. In the rest of this article, I will detail two different ways to shelve changes using branches in Subversion.
