PHP - application patch build

Question

I'm trying to come up with a better solution for our development group to build patches for our applications (PHP).

We currently submit to SVN daily, but do not run a continuous integration server, as code checked in can be buggy. For building patches, we check against a "date modified", from the last build. A lot of times though, we're already starting development on new features, or have other bug fixes, etc that are not scheduled for the patch. So we have to pick it out when running against test servers.

What I'm looking for is an easy way to flag files (we use NetBeans as our IDE) and then build off that. As we go through our own testing, we'd flag the file, etc. This could simply be a text string in the file (we'd strip it out for live though).

Again, our issue is trying to keep track of which files are flagged as ready to go, versus what's currently in development.

Answer 1

My question is why not develop in branches? If you create a branch for each major new feature, then you will always have a "stable" branch. Then you just create your patches off of that stable branch, and it'll only ever include completed and vetted code. When a development branch is ready to go, after testing just do a SVN Merge to get the data back into the stable branch...

Trying to keep track of "production" files is going to be a major PITA (Especially if you have multiple developers). So just avoid the whole problem.