Branching just a few files... retroactively?

jessek · Post by **jessek** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 10:59 am

Sorry for the noobish question:

I have a web application with 200 files. A developer tried to rewrite three of them (without branching), but the rewrite is too buggy to be checked into the trunk, and we need to make maintenance changes to the original version.

What's the best way to roll the files back to the original state, but keep the new (buggy) rewrites around so that she can keep working on them, outside the trunk?

On a related noted: is it possible to branch just a few files, or does a branch have to cover an entire directory / application?

Thanks!

Beth · Post by **Beth** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 3:25 pm

Once the user checks their file in, you can go into history and perform a rollback to the previous version. What that will do is make the version after the rollback be the same as the previous version. What that does is gets the buggy version into the database in the history of that file.

If that user is going to work on that file for a long time and you want their work to be separate for a while, you can go into history and perform a branch on that buggy version and then perform a merge later.

You can branch individual files.