Best practice for branching and merging? Depends on your SCM.

I ran across a nice blog entry discussing the different use case assumptions made by Perforce vs ClearCase regarding when developers will branch and merge. After using Perforce for the last two years and reading Laura Wingerd’s excellent book Practical Perforce, I’m heavily biased to the point of view that routine development should happen on the trunk, and branches should be created only to fix bugs in old releases or to develop experimental new features that might not get merged back into the trunk.

But I also believe in the “when in Rome” principle. As developers, we should try to conform to the spirit and assumptions behind the tools we are using (e.g. nobody will thank you for using Lisp idioms in Java). So if we have to use ClearCase, and the Atria / Rational / IBM people expect us to develop on private branches, maybe we should. Opinions?