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I asked a batch of related questions in When did current source control management emerge? and I am wondering what is the best preactice to do so.

If one asks several related questions in a single SE-question, it might be hard to choose appropriately a correct answer or to attribute a bounty.

If one asks a lot of small questions, sharing some common background, it looks like flooding or spamming and may irritate readers, because of the repeating shared background.

What is the best practice here?

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On the one hand you should try to group the related questions. On the other hand you should try to avoid creating a single beast question with many subquestions that should better be separate questions. Let's take a look at the example that you refer:

  • When SCM was used for the first time in an organisation developing software?
  • When was released the first free-software SCM?
  • When was released the first SCM shipped by a software company?
  • When was given the first talk about SCM in a developer's meeting of international importance?
  • Which alternative schemes to the one unstable and one or more stable branches scheme are used today, by a significantly large community (e.g. a large company).

It seems that the first three (perhaps four) questions can be grouped into one, but the last question is clearly unrelated.

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As far as I can see,

If one asks a lot of small questions, sharing some common background, it looks like flooding or spamming and may irritate readers, because of the repeating shared background.

  1. This does not happen, as in.. all sub-set of questions asked by a single person, on a single thread, does not cause background flooding over head, because for any 1 ..n question on a topic, it's good to have short background info.

  2. Also, people who comment/answer, always refer to hyperlinks/previous discussions if the questioner had overlooked them/haven't been able find a related topic/discussion happened already.

So, I don't really see a need. As always there can be ways to improve. But, what would be a good initiative is what I'm not sure of.

Thanks

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