Re: How is a patch applied to CVS?

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 11:14:59AM +1100, Matthew Herrmann wrote:
> But can patch be run in such a way that it generates conflict markers
> instead of .rej files?

I don't think so.

> Or is diff3 the go here instead?

Yup.  There's also "merge".  That's part of the RCS distribution;
it's an intermediate layer between rcsmerge (which understands
RCS files, revisions, etc., and which is thus pretty irrelevent
in a CVS context) and diff3 (which does the real work).  I don't
recall offhand what value merge adds to diff3 -- a quick glance
at its man page doesn't show me anything that diff3 isn't already
doing -- but there must be something I missed, and whatever it
is, it might be useful :-)

Of course, diff3 is what CVS uses internally.  It might be
possible to structure your development process such that there's
a CVS branch that the patch will apply cleanly to, so you can
then use a CVS merge rather than messing with diff3 yourself.

That's the theory anyway.  I looked into this a few months ago,
and found that I didn't have the time to script a solution that
would work in our specific situation.

In an open-source situation, with people submitting patches
against various releases, nightly snapshots, and/or random "cvs
update"s, I doubt this sort of approach has a chance.  You'd end
up with *zillions* of little one-revision branches, one for each
submitted patch.  Ick!

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
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Just Say No to the "faceless cannonfodder" stereotype.
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