Re: [Gnu-arch-users] --forward and --skip-present

[Miles Bader]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 05:34:26PM -0400, Milan Cvetkovic wrote:
> What is the exact difference of --forward and --skip-present?
> 
> The explanation on the wiki is not really clear, except that one of them 
> is "--forward is superior alternative to --skip-present"

They are completely different things:

  * `--forward' tells the patch command to ignore duplicate patch hunks
    without complaint (like CVS does by default).  So if your merging somehow
    causes the same changes to be applied twice from different branches, the
    duplicate changes will be `applied' by tla but ignored by the low-level
    patch command that actually does the application (usually ... :-).

  * `--skip-present' tells e.g. replay to skip _entire changesets_ if there's
    evidence from the patch-logs that they might have already been applied to
    the current tree; so in this case, `duplicate changesets' won't be
    applied by tla at all.  Using --skip-present is I think bit more touchy,
    as you have to maintain certain constraints for it to work well, so it
    requires more discipline.

--forward is probably easier to use for most people, though in both cases it
helps to know what's going on...

-Miles
-- 
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread.