[TYPO3-dev] Offline PHP Development with source control (Subversion, Git, etc.)

[Thomas "Thasmo" Deinhamer]

Dominique Feyer wrote:
> My setups:
>
> 1. Clone main repository
> 2. Use symlink to use this extension in my local TYPO3 instance
> 3. Coding - drinking coffee - commit (this loop can have some infinite
> loop problem)
> 4. When the feature are done, pushing to the main GIT repos
> 5. On my staging server, fetching the last development version
> 6. Client validation
> 7. Bugfixes on my local setup, pushing the change to the main repos,
> fetching on the staging server
> 8. If every thing is fine, fetching on the production server, and that's
> done

Hi Dominique and thanks for your reply!

Since your e-mail I dedicated some time to investigate a few topics
like source code management, in general SVN/Git, also Phing etc.

Now I've installed a WAMP package on my machine, where I can set up
a local development environment.

Those are the tasks I want to work on locally:
* Developing/patching TYPO3
* Developing web projects
* Developing TYPO3 extensions

Now some more questions/problems came up and it
would be cool if you or someone else could help me out.

1.) Developing/patching TYPO3
I'd like to check out the TYPO3 source code from the SVN repository,
therefor I'm using TortoiseSVN, which works very well. Now I got the
TYPO3 sources and was wondering what would be the best way to set up
a useful TYPO3 development environment? I'd like to provide patches for
all recent TYPO3 version, meaning trunk, 4.4, 4.3 and probably also 4.2.

Do I need 4 separate TYPO3 installations now, to test the different
TYPO3 versions? Or is there another way of developing for all versions?

2.) Developing web projects
For every project I will set up a separate Apache vHost and a MySQL
database. I was wondering now if I just could "symlink" the TYPO3
sources directly to my local TYPO3 SVN working copy, e.g.
directly linking to the 4.4 tag etc. Is this the correct way or is it
not recommended? Because if I would do that, I could just checkout any 
new patches etc. and would have the latest, patched version for the web
projects.

Or is it not recommended for any reasons? Is it better to make an export
of the working copy and use this as source for the projects?

3.) Developing TYPO3 extensions
I'd like to develop TYPO3 extensions and test them also on different
TYPO3 versions to ensure they're working everywhere. Now I'm wondering
how I can do that efficiently without to much work. Would I need again
4 separate TYPO3 installations, each referring to another TYPO3 version,
or is there another way?

Is it maybe possible to set up one TYPO3 installation for each version
(4.4, 4.3, 4.2) and use those for TYPO3 AND extension development?

Thanks a lot in advance,
Thomas