Re: Question regarding merging branches

"Dylan Cuthbert" <dylan@q-games.com> writes:

> It seems that this kind of patching will generate bugs because it is
> "piecemeal". ie. parts of the file get updated because there's no clash, and
> other parts don't because there is. However, the parts that do get updated
> might rely on the changes in the clashing parts. (as they are all in the
> same file)

This is not a new model; CVS has been doing this for 15 years.

As Bill Tutt said -- CVS and Subversion can do contextual, line-based
merges. This purely syntactic, not semantic. There's no guarantee
you'll get semantically correct tode.

Similarly, even if a merge happens perfectly on a file, there's no
guarantee that the project as a whole will be semantically correct.
These are problems only solvable by human coordination.

If you don't want 'diff3' to run (which causes the contextual
merging), just set the 'svn:mime-type' property on the file to
anything other than 'text/*'. Whenever you update or merge, your
working file will be placed side-by-side with the new file; you can
then use an external tool to merge the two.

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Received on Tue Sep 10 04:07:19 2002