RE: .origin patch

[Stephen Rasku]

Steve Cameron wrote:

>Stephen Rasku [mailto:stephen@tgivan.com] wrote:
>
>> I was asked to look at Steve Cameron's .origin patch a few 
>> months ago. 
>>  I have had it installed for about 4 months now and none of my 
>> developers have complained about anything being broken.
>>
>Nice to hear, though I suspect most of them aren't using the 
>new features simply because there is not usually a frequent
>need to do so.  (Though I could imagine using ".trunk" regularly).

The point I was making is that it didn't break anything else.  I 
actually haven't told them of the new features yet.  I am usually the 
only one who does merges so it would probably be most useful to me 
anyways.

>
>> Today, I did a merge using the .origin feature.  My original merge 
was
>> 
>>      cvs update -kk -j branch
>>      
>> which generated a lot of spurious differences.  I then did:
>> 
>>      cvs update -kk -j branch.origin -j branch
>>      
>> and it generated a much cleaner tree.  I only had one conflict to 
>> resolve.
>
>I don't think that's really a feature of my patch, 
>I would expect that you'd get the same results if 
>you had done:
>
>       cvs update -kk -j static_tag -j branch
>
>where "static_tag" would be a normal tag you created to 
>mark the beginning of the branch when the branch was created.

I expect that would be the case.  The problem is that you have to be 
thoughtful enough to create the static tag in the first place.  That's 
why I like this feature.

>
>Were the "spurious" conflicts coming from files which were
>deleted on the branch you were merging from,
>(which is what would I expect) or something else?

There were no files that were deleted on the branch so that couldn't 
be it.  The branch is actually a branch of a branch and I am merging 
to the trunk.  I don't know if that enlightens you or not.  I think 
maybe some changes were made on the branch but not on the sub-branch 
and these were migrated during the merge.

If I get a chance to look at this again, I will give you more details.

-- 
Stephen Rasku                   E-mail: stephen@tgivan.com
Senior Software Engineer        Web:    http://www.pop-star.net/
TGI Technologies