I'm working for an ASP with a weekly publishing cycle. I'm going to describe how I've set things up and am looking for some comments on how I can do it better (i.e. less work for me) and still manage risk. Since we have this weekly publishing cycle, I basically establish policies for the branches based on release date. Also note that the code base includes perl modules, templates, and html/javascript.

I have a mainline that only I have access to. I've branched for the weekly site publishing. This is an ongoing branch. I integrate to mainline when we publish and I publish from mainline.

I branch for new features off of mainline. Currently this is one branch, but will soon become more.

I also branch for bug fixes and this is the biggest problem for me. Our one week publishing cycle makes this difficult, so I create individual branches. Since the code base has so many dependencies and we can't clearly define release dates for these fixes, I have to create branch for each bug fix. Otherwise, I could be asked to integrate a bug fix and inadvertently add a perl module that includes fixes for a bug fix not ready for release.

So this is a difficult system to manage, and the first system I've managed. I've read about and understand SCM theories, and I see that our weekly publishing cycle is the biggest hurdle. I'd like to know that I'm using Perforce as best I can in this scenario.

Thanks for reading this fairly long message,

Scott