Strange conflicts as a result of merging a branch into the main t runk

[Reinstein, Shlomo]

Hi,

I have encountered merge conflicts that are very strange to me:
At some point during the development of a project, we created a branch from
the main trunk. A lot of work was done in that branch, but ever since the
branch was created, NO work was done on main trunk. That is, the latest
version of the main trunk is the same version from which the branch was
forked off.
At some point, we wanted to merge the work done on the branch back into the
main trunk. To do this, we checked-out the latest version of the project
from the main trunk, and in the working directory that we got, we used:
        cvs update -j branch-name

Since no work was done on the main trunk since the creation of the branch,
I'd expect CVS to just update the working directory with the newest version
of the branch. (which would be the result of merging all changes made in the
branch into the working directory.) However, the results were different.
During this merge, we encountered conflicts! Can you explain this?

I'll give a few more details on this. We have a file named "isis.c". It's
latest version on the main trunk is 1.81. The latest version of this file on
the branch is 1.81.2.17. When we merged the changes made on the branch into
the main trunk, CVS output showed that it merged the changes between 1.81
and 1.81.2.17 into the working directory. The working directory contained
1.81 itself (the latest version of the main trunk), so I'd expect to get
1.81.2.17 as a result of the merge. However, instead of that I got
conflicts...

Thanks,
Shlomo