[cvsnt] How to merge without conflicts?

[Eric B.]

"Rick Genter" <rgenter at silverlink.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.29.1202171111.1277.cvsnt at cvsnt.org...
> On 2/4/08 4:03 PM, "Arthur Barrett" <arthur.barrett at march-hare.com> wrote:
>
>> Eric,
>>
>>> Is there any way to do a "merge", but to indicate to CVS that
>>> what I really
>>> want is a fresh copy of a particular version of a file (in
>>> this case, the
>>> latest HEAD version) in my branch and to not actually try to
>>> merge the
>>> differences themselves?
>>
>> No there is not.
>>
>> The only instances where the 'whole file' should be in conflict is if it
>> is a very very small file (diff can't really do much with a 3 line file)
>> or if it is a unicode file (there is a bug - we have a patch for
>> commercial customers but it is waiting resources to merge it in to
>> 2.5.04).
>>
>> When I need to do a merge/replace what I do is a 'normal' merge then
>> take the list of files that were updated and 'copy' them from the
>> originating branch/head sandbox over the top of the 'merged' sandbox.
>> It's a bit manual - but it is a fairly dangerous thing to do, so I'd
>> personally not really be happy with it being automagic.
>>
>> Alternatively you can use Winmerge tree merge and copy from one
>> direction to the other.  It is my intention to create a patch for
>> Winmerge to create mergepoints properly when this is done - but I've no
>> idea how far down my list that task is...
>
> If you know that the version on the branch is what you want, you can do 
> the
> following:
>
> 1) Create a sandbox for the trunk : cvs co -P module
> -P says to prune empty directories
>
> 2) To update the trunk so that its contents match that of branch "b": cvs 
> up
> -P -d -jb -jHEAD
>
> This tells cvs to update the current sandbox merging in all changes from 
> "b"
> to the trunk. Since you are already on the trunk, this effectively 
> replaces
> your files with a copy of what's on branch "b", but your sandbox is still
> for the trunk. The -d flag will cause any directories that were created on
> "b" since it was branched to be created in the sandbox. The -P will remove
> any empty directories once the merge is finished. The result should be 
> such
> that the files/directories in your sandbox is a copy of branch "b", but is
> still a trunk sandbox.
>
> 3) cvs commit -m "Replace trunk with what's on branch b"
> This commits the changes to the repository.
>
> Of course, you can do this for individual files as well:
>
> cvs up -jb -jHEAD module/path/to/file
>
> will only update the one file.
>
> I recommend tagging both branch b and the trunk before you do this so you
> can get back to a known state if something goes wrong (like, you meant to 
> do
> one file but do the whole module instead).


Perfect!  Thanks!  Worked like a charm!  (with a little manual massaging)

Eric