doing Perforce-style "pure" integrations

Without going into too much detail, I just want to point out that
Subversion should support the concept of the "pure integration", like
Perforce:

   http://www.perforce.com/perforce/branch.html
   (search for "pure" in that page)

For example, if you merge branch B into a locally-unmodified trunk,
but end up doing some conflict resolution before you commit that
trunk, you want to be able to tell Subversion that it's still a pure
merge. Meaning that when you commit, the ancestors added to the new
version N's ancestor set should be exactly those obtained from the
merge from B -- the stuff you did for conflict resolution doesn't
count. That way, if you later have to merge back from the trunk to B,
the change N will will not be included in the merge, because B knows
it already has those changes, even though textually they might not be
exactly what B already has.

Well, that's a bit terse, but between that and the paper you should
get the idea.

Note that it's not an automatic thing -- Subversion can't decide for
the user whether or not to mark a commit as being from a pure merge;
some merges are and some aren't. The user has to consciously flag it
as pure.

-K
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:07 2006