Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Mixing star-merge and selective replay

[Tom Lord]

    > From: address@hidden (Julian T. J. Midgley)

    > In article <address@hidden>,
    > Neil Stevens  <address@hidden> wrote:

    > >replay up to patch-21, replay patch-20 in reverse, then sync-tree back 
to 
    > >21.

    > This appears to be semantically equivalent to Aaron's version, and
    > again, when I try it in practice, the next star-merge from bar back to
    > foo (i.e tla star-merge -t proj--bar--0.1 isssued in foo's tree)
    > removes patch-20's changes from foo as well.

Other people are giving detailed help in this thread and I'm busy
finishing up my move to a new place but.... 

Once you get into the area of mixing and matching merge techniques in
weird ways .... you're in "expert" territory.  The practical thing I'd
suggest is that you get to a point where you can answer, in your head,
what each merge command you think you want to run will do in each
particular case.  E.g., it shouldn't surprise you what star-merge did
there .... it's quite predictable ... but you have to not regard
star-merge as a black-box to get to that point.

(None of the intricacy of merging is created by arch.   It's intrinsic
in the nature of diffing/patching/merging.  Arch just gives you pretty
good control over this process -- most systems don't -- so it can be a
little overwhelming at first.   Who am I kidding: it's permanently
overwhelming which is why we do things like worry about "patch flow
topology" to keep it from getting out-of-hand.)


-t