[cvsnt] Feature request: Commitable tags

[Tony Hoyle]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003 12:29:18 +0100, "Max Bowsher" <maxb at ukf.net> wrote:

> Commitable tags are a kind of just-in-time branching, the idea being to
> avoid the need to branch and then repeatedly merge when multiple lines of
> development share the same file but are very unlikely to change it. (An
> example: a new feature being developed in a complex project - only a subset
> of files will contain actual changes, the rest only redundant copies of the
> trunk changes, as they are merged into the branch).

What you're describing there is a sort of 'half branch' where the file is
branched but the branch isn't 'real' until a revision is actually added to it.
That makes much more sense than mucking around with tags, since it's almost
how CVS works already (when you branch a file the branch is created but there
are no branch revisions as such... it doesn't really exist until someone
commits to it).

>
>I believe that the true answer to this problem is to simply merge regularly.
>(And perhaps implement some kind of extension to the RCS file format so that
>a revision can say "I have no changetext of my own, I am exactly equal to
><revnum>".)
>
mergepoints do that already, in a limited sense - if you've merged a file,
then edited out all the changes there are no change deltas but the mergepoint
is still recorded with a null delta (techincally it wastes a few bytes by
doing so but nothing worth worrying about).

Tony