If you are using any SCM that allows cheap branches (like Perforce) and are following the advices from the High-level Best Practices document, you might be interested in (or already know) Laura Wingerd’s presentation Convergence vs. Divergence: Purposeful Merging with Perforce about how to converge to codelines using Merge Down, Copy Up [PDF]. I have seen it many times that a main codeline got broken because the Merge Down, Copy Up idiom was ignored.
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