I'm also a big fan - for a tight team anyway, might be harder for a more distributed project - you should eat your own dog food - more incentive to not check in

I'm also a big fan - for a tight team anyway, might be harder for a more distributed project - you should eat your own dog food - more incentive to not check in crap and an incentive to fix broken stuff fast. Having an autobuild system to build every checkin is a big plus. I worked on a chip once where we decided to make everything a branch, at one horrible point we didn't have a mainline, we didn't know what we were building, we had to put people on full time merging trying to figure out what to test.