On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Branko Èibej <brane_at_xbc.nu> wrote:
> Mark Phippard wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Purple Streak
>> <mrpurplestreak_at_googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Is this true from the SVN book...
>>>
>>> "In Subversion 1.5, once a --reintegrate merge is done from branch to
>>> trunk, the branch is no longer usable for further work. It's not able
>>> to correctly absorb new trunk changes, nor can it be properly
>>> reintegrated to trunk again. For this reason, if you want to keep
>>> working on your feature branch, we recommend destroying it and then
>>> re-creating it from the trunk"
>>>
>>> So once you reintegrate that means the branch is dead (which means you
>>> must merge everything back in one go and start a new branch)?
>>>
>>
>> Yes and no.
>>
>> The idea is that branches are cheap and it makes sense to "re-branch".
>>
>
> Whups. Branches are cheap in terms of repository space and time, but
> *not* cheap in terms of making sense of tangled history. The one is
> handled automagically by the code, the other causes inflammation of
> developers' brains. Better then to let *one* developer get her brains
> inflamed while figuring out how to write code that detects when
> --reintegrate is needed.
>
>> If you do not re-branch the point is that you cannot simply do
>> another synch up merge with trunk as you had been doing before. If
>> you do, then it will attempt to merge back the merge you did from the
>> branch. So you either need to do a 2-URL merge to synch trunk back to
>> the branch or perhaps a --record-only merge in the branch so that it
>> does not try to merge it back.
>>
>
> So basically, you need to reintegrate back and forth between the two
> branches, right?
>
>> From a documentation point of view, I think it makes sense to
>> recommend that users re-branch.
>>
>
> I can't say that I agree ... people will say, based on the
> documentation, that SVN is stupid if it can't support more than one
> merge-back from a branch. Not the sort of expectation you want to set.
Yes, SVN's support for merging is stupid, and --reintegrate is little
more than a band-aid. But given the model we're still trying to
support for some reason, that's more or less how it has to be. Why
bother trying to set a completely false expectation?
--dave
--
David Glasser | glasser@davidglasser.net | http://www.davidglasser.net/
Received on 2008-11-18 22:50:16 CET