We are investigating the web portion of an application at the office and there are some items that need to be investigated in the mean time. For instance, I need to find a practical approach to bring the APS pages supplied by the vendor into source control.

During each version update they supply a new set of APS pages, most of the time only some of the code within the pages changes but the number of pages is significant enough that I am looking for some help from CVS. In addition to the changes from version to version, there are some customizations that we have to implement within each version release. I need to identify a simple workflow that will help us deal with what changes need to be handled as a new version is released.

CVS provides tags and branches to identify certain points with a code repository. I believe that using branches for each new version released by the vendor would allow us to work within each branch, even in a historical fashion. Having access to previous versions would allow us to do some regression testing if we found it to be needed. However, I fear that by using branches, our repository will become a little too — mmmm — complex? Not the right word but I need to look into this a little bit more.