I'd like to have a way to work with a consistent set of metadata items for a release, that I can add, remove etc, and consistently deploy into a variety of sandboxes and ultimately Production.

Currently, if you clone a previous deploy, items are de-selected if they're the same between the environments being compared. That means once I've deployed, I can’t ever get that “list” of items back and I have to rebuild it every time.

A likely scenario is that I've deployed some metadata from Sandbox A -> B. Lets say it's 5 Apex classes. I then realize that I need layouts in there too. Ideally I can clone the previous deploy, add the layouts and deploy again. That way when it's time to deploy to a new environment, say Sandbox C or Production, I have a deployment to clone that has the Apex Classes AND the layouts. Currently I'd either need to build a new deployment by hand, or clone both deploys. That gets unmanageable fast.

Currently what I do is maintain a Package.xml file with all the metadata items that are part of a release, and this list is added to/modified as I work on it with other developers. All deploys are done with this xml so that I know when I deploy it to Sandbox 1 and then Sandbox 2 it’s the same set of metadata every time.

I'd like a way to clone deploys and keep all the previously selected items selected, even if they match between the orgs.

Here is a screencast in case this is helpful: https://share.getcloudapp.com/jkuWzPA7