[Gnu-arch-users] How to avoid conflict when backporting/cherypicking

[Milan Cvetkovic]

Hi GNU-Arch experts,

I have a question regarding back-porting. When a bug is discovered, in 
one of the earlier releases, it is also known that the same bug had been 
fixed in develoipment branch. So we choose to apply the patch from 
development branch back to bugfix branch.

How should I merge these changes cleanly?

Suppose we have two branches:

proj--main--2.0              proj--bugfix--1.0
base-0                 ----- base-0
patch-1               /      patch-1
patch-2---( tag -> ) -   --- patch-2
patch-3                 /    patch-3
patch-4---( replay-> )--
patch-5

proj--main--2.0--patch-4 is replayed to proj--bugfix--1.0
After this point, there are some additional changes in both branches.

wd-proj-main--2.0$ tla missing -f proj--bugfix--1.0
proj--bugfix--1.0--patch-1
proj--bugfix--1.0--patch-2
proj--bugfix--1.0--patch-3
wd--proj--bugfix--1.0$ tla missing -f proj--main--2.0
proj--main--2.0--patch-3
proj--main--2.0--patch-5

My goal is to have proj--main--2.0 with all patch-logs from 
proj--bugfix--1.0.

If I just do "tla replay proj--bugfix--1.0" I will have the conflicts 
since proj--bugfix--1.0--patch-2 and proj--main--2.0--patch-4 are 
modifying the same files.

"tla replay --forward" also generates conflicts.
"tla replay --skip-present" would skip proj--bugfix--1.0--patch-2, but 
this patch would stay missing forever.

What is "the right way" to deal with this problem.

Any help/suggestions are appreciated.

Milan.