Managing feature additions and bug fixes with Subversion

So, you’ve finished working on the initial release of an application and it goes live. At a later date you have to add an additional feature, sometimes more than one, but before these can go live, they require testing and approval.

Sometimes, the client wants subsequently implemented feature additions deployed before earlier ones. What happens if these involve changes to the same files?

In the meantime, bugs in the live application are identified and need fixing and deploying immediately, but these require changes to files that you’ve already changed for a feature addition, that is not ready to go live yet, and if it did, would break the application!

Sound familiar, if so, read on for a solution.