Setting up SVN to Best Suit Dev -> QA -> Prod

Question

I'm sorry if this has already been asked, but I haven't been able to find an answer specific to this situation:

For our web application, we have 3 systems: dev, QA, and production. Right now, a third party is maintaining the code, but soon it will be in our hands. We will have separate build environments for each stage. Also, we use RAD for code development, so there'll actually be a primary step, test/sandbox.

Ideally, we'd like to somehow isolate repositories for each stage, such that we check out from DEV, make some changes, test them locally, and check them back into DEV. If everything is ok on Dev, we will check into QA, and so on.

Should we have separate repositories for each, or would this fall under 'branching', where we'd have a separate branch for dev, QA, and prod. Could you also provide the best means of implementing whatever the ideal route is?

Let me know if there are any other questions, also.

Thanks Chris

Answer 1

use branching and merging

We do the following:

When we release we create a current release branch. We make bug fixes here between releases, then merge them back to our trunk.

We develop on trunk and when we are ready to release we make a QA branch. We test and fix on it and then push it out and it becomes our current release branch.