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Re: [TSVN] what happened to the default merge From URL

From: Daniel Atallah <daniel.atallah_at_gmail.com>
Date: 2005-07-06 16:29:33 CEST

On 6/13/05, Simon Large <slarge@slarge.plus.com> wrote:
> Bill Wrenn wrote:
> >> bwrenn wrote:
> >>> Just recently upgraded from 1.1.5 to 1.2.0 and notice that the
> >>> default From: URL of merge is no longer the URL of the object
> >>> selected. It seems to be the last url used instead. Is this a bug
> >>> or am I missing something?
> >>
> > Simon Large wrote:
> >> Normally you are merging from branch to trunk or vice versa. Merging
> >> from trunk to trunk is rarely necessary, so making that the default
> >> URL doesn't make much sense.
> >>
> >> The one common case of merging from trunk to trunk is when you want
> >> to revert an earlier change. You can do that much more easily from
> >> the log dialog, and in 1.2.0 you can revert multiple (consecutive)
> >> revisions.
> >
> > I agree, I never merge from trunk to trunk. But having the current
> > URL up gives me something to edit instead of typing it in from
> > scratch. We have over 25,000 files and hundreds of subdirectories
> > and it's difficult to find a past one even if it were there.
> >
> > From: C:\branches\v6.1.1\Java\src\com\appworx\agent\outputscan\
> > To: C:\trunk\Java\src\com\appworx\agent\outputscan
>
> Many people are only working on one branch at a time, so they normally
> want to merge changes from the same place many times. The combo box
> retains tha last 20 URLs used in that repository, which is enough for
> most people.
>
> However, if you really want the URL of your working copy, it is shown at
> the bottom of the merge dialog and you can copy and paste it into the
> 'From:' URL if that helps.
>
> Simon

I hate to bring up an issue that has already been discussed, but this
particular issue has been biting several people at my workplace (and
consequently me).

I do understand the logic of displaying the history in the From URL,
but for our usage (which I'm guessing is pretty common), the current
functionality is somewhat non intuitive.

Like many projects that are in a production environment, for our
current release, we have a "stable" branch and a "testing" branch.
Bugfixes and enhancements and developed against the testing branch.
What happens when a change is ready to be deployed to our production
servers, is that we merge the specific changes from the testing branch
to the stable branch. These changes are usually several revisions,
but are not necessarily sequential. Because we are working with a
codebase that is quite large, and these changes are often isolated to
a small sub section of the project, the merge is often done on
specific sub directories, or even files. The fact that we're
frequently merging at many different levels makes the history listing
in the merge dialog less useful for us because the default URL is
almost always "wrong" and requires two changes - (it needs to be
updated to point at the current working copy and then the branch name
changed).

I understand that if we were always merging at the same level, then
the history would make more sense (and perhaps it would be a better
practice for us to perform all merges at the root level).

I'd like to suggest that perhaps the best of both worlds can be
offered by simply defaulting the from URL to the resource of the
object currently selected and also having the history in the
selectbox.

I recognize that Simon's solution (to copy and paste the working copy
URL from below) is a workaround (and we have been using it), but the
fact that I've had to help coworkers with this issue several times
when the merge is "not working" seems to suggest that the current
functionality is confusing (or we're using it wrong). That we also
seem to get get the sandbox locked up, and have to execute a cleanup
whenever the merge fails (because there is no such revision at the URL
specified) makes the occurrence of this issue even more time
consuming.

I hope that I'm not stepping on anyone's toes here, that is certainly
not my intention, nor do I want to sound ungrateful - I am very
thankful for your hard work with TSVN and am a big fan.

Thanks a bunch.

-Daniel Atallah

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Received on Wed Jul 6 16:30:07 2005

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