[cvsnt] Re: Merging branches with mergepoints

[Detlef Marschall]

Am 02.12.2005 schrieb Tony Hoyle:

> Detlef Marschall wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Both came from HEAD, B1 from "rev. 1.3" and B2 from "rev. 1.8". Sorry
>> for confusion. All branches came from HEAD.
>>  
> There's no logical connection between a branch based on revision 1.3 and 
> a branch based on
> revision 1.8 - they may be completely different streams of development, 
> or they may be quite similar.. it's not something you can solve with 
> mergepoints.  However this isn't really a problem.

Sorry for my contradiction, that's only true when I never merged B1 to
the HEAD. In all other cases is there no need to merge all changes, from
the start of B1 till the end of B1 to another branch, that is later
split from HEAD. Never, what ever I do with the source in the new
branch. The new branch has always the latest merged change from B1.

>>>After the first merge you will have a mergepoint and it'll work normally.
>> 
>> 
>> That's right, but is not acceptable in our development. We must then use
>> the "commit --> merge with TAG and Branch --> TAG" way. Mergepoints are
>> very useful, but in that case they are to complicated and cause more
>> problems as they solved.
> 
> You stated that you're merging HEAD->B1 then B1->B2 - mergepoints will 
> handle this well. The first merge B1->B2 will be the hardest of course, 
> but once that is done it'll work well (just standard promotion levels, 
> which is done by a lot of people).

There's a problem. The user must know that this is the first merge to B2
for the specific source. Then he must use "-jTAG -jBRANCH" for the
merge, otherwise he can merge with "-jBRANCH". For only a few sources is
this OK. But there are 2816 sources, without includes, and nobody can
say how many he must change for a problem. Only when all sources was
merged from B1 to B2 then we can use mergepoints with no problem.

bye
Detlef