In an actual interview, I would only pull out that specific example for a candidate who's worked with CVS and Subversion almost exclusively. The actual question is also a bit more verbose:
Have you worked for a company that strives to do as much development as possible in 'trunk', creating a release branch near deployment time for production bugfixes? Have you worked for a company that preferred to branch at the outset of new development, merging back to 'trunk' periodically? What did you find to be the strengths and weaknesses of each approach?
Their answer lets me read between the lines and gleen much more information about their work history. Have they worked in settings where multiple work streams were in development simultaneously? Do they have substantial experience in collaborating without trampling on shared resources? If so, then they usually mention the different pain points in merging. I don't consider there to be a "right" or "wrong" answer to this question, and not having a clever answer certainly doesn't disqualify someone from being a strong programmer. But it does help to level-set, and identify candidates who think like team leads or might be well suited for responsibly beyond raw coding.
However, I don't want too much text between parentheses that are injected into a long sentence. So you get "trunk-first vs. branch-first". :)
Have you worked for a company that strives to do as much development as possible in 'trunk', creating a release branch near deployment time for production bugfixes? Have you worked for a company that preferred to branch at the outset of new development, merging back to 'trunk' periodically? What did you find to be the strengths and weaknesses of each approach?
Their answer lets me read between the lines and gleen much more information about their work history. Have they worked in settings where multiple work streams were in development simultaneously? Do they have substantial experience in collaborating without trampling on shared resources? If so, then they usually mention the different pain points in merging. I don't consider there to be a "right" or "wrong" answer to this question, and not having a clever answer certainly doesn't disqualify someone from being a strong programmer. But it does help to level-set, and identify candidates who think like team leads or might be well suited for responsibly beyond raw coding.
However, I don't want too much text between parentheses that are injected into a long sentence. So you get "trunk-first vs. branch-first". :)