Re: To reintegrate or not to be ...

Branko Čibej wrote:
> Hey.
>
> A question suddenly popped into my mind.
> So we have "svn merge --reintegrate" for doing repeated merges between
> two active branches. Now I wondered, since this is probably the most
> common merge usage in a centralized version control model, wouldn't it
> be nice if one didn't have to type an unwholesomely long option to
> enable it?

I challenge the statement that this is the most common type of merge. In
fact, for --reintegrate to work, the to-be-reintegrated branch must have had
all the changes thus far from the target branch merged into it. Therefore
at a minimum, there is a 1:1 ratio of non-reintegrate merges to reintegrate
merges. But in reality, there are still more of the non-reintegrate types
of merge because folks are keeping their feature branches up-to-date
incrementally over time. In other words the pattern is (omitting the
non-branch-maintenance changes):

  - branch /trunk to /feature-branch
  - merge all unmerged changes from /trunk to /feature-branch
  - merge all unmerged changes from /trunk to /feature-branch
  - merge all unmerged changes from /trunk to /feature-branch
  - ...
  - reintegrate /feature-branch back to /trunk

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
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