Re: MFC'ing

[Kaz Kylheku]

"Philip M. Gollucci" <address@hidden> wrote in message news:<address@hidden>...
> Thanks in advanced. Sorry for the crosspost, but I know some of you FreeB
> SD 
> developers do this all the time.

But this is a CVS newsgroup/mailing list, not a FreeBSD forum. The
term MFC means nothing here, but looking up a FreeBSD FAQ reveals
that:

  16.15. What does MFC mean?

  MFC is an acronym for ``Merged From -CURRENT''. It is used in
  the CVS logs to denote when a change was migrated from the
  CURRENT to the STABLE branches.

In other words, it denotes a merge in the wrong direction (from a CVS
perspective). To the rest of the world, MFC either means nothing, or
stands for Microsoft Foundation Classes, a proprietary C++ framework
for GUI development on Windows. :)

Don't assume that everyone understands your tribal acronyms.

CVS has little support for this MFC'ing. Suppose that a feature is
developed on the trunk, and that feature consists of multiple commits
over many days. Those commits will be interleaved with other commits
done by other people that have nothing to do with that feature. To
create a patch, you will have to unravel your changes from among those
irrelevant ones manually.

If you suspect that a feature you are doing on the trunk may be of
interest to other lines of development* then you should represent it
as its own branch, with a tagged branchpoint and all. Such a feature
isolation branch is simple to merge  wherever you want.

---
* ``line[s] of development'' is a trademark of Shi^H^H^HBitMover,
Inc., makers of the BitKeeper version control system.