The TRUNK of our Subversion repository has historically been used for new feature development with stable changes being merged to the SAMBA_3_0 branch. Lately, TRUNK and SAMBA_3_0 have been completely in sync, forcing the need for small patches to be applied to both branches and creating a lot of branch maintenance overhead. Release manager Jerry Carter proposed a solution:

trunk has served its purposes in the past but really is of little use today. I propose that we

• Use SAMBA_3_0 solely for development and drop trunk.
• When we are close to shipping 3.0.24, we copy SAMBA_3_0 to SAMBA_3_0_24 to stabilize. but normal dev work goes on in SAMBA_3_0. This also prevents the loss of history when we cut-over from trunk to SAMBA_3_0.
• Continue to use /branch/SAMBA_3_0_RELEASE to cut the tarballs for official releases.

After Derrell's suggestion to use svn:externals property settings, the decision was made to replace TRUNK with a series of svn:external properties that pull current sources from the SAMBA_3_0 branch.

So what's all this mean? TRUNK is no longer used and commits are made solely in the SAMBA_3_0 branch. However, TRUNK will pull a copy of SAMBA_3_0 so that automated testing tools relying on the presence of TRUNK will continue to work.