Re: Reviewing merged changes

Tim Armes wrote:
> After the merge, the svn diff only shows your local changes, since these are
> the only differences with repect to the head revision. There's no way to
> see the differences between the locally modified version after the merge and
> the locally modified version before the merge.

This may be too subtle a point for me to grasp this early in the morning. ;~)

OK, so you have locally modified files (which you are not ready to commit). You
run 'svn up' to merge in any changes from the trunk, some of which my make
further changes to the already locally modified files. Does that cover what you
are concerned about?

How about:

        svn diff > premerge
        svn up
        svn diff > postmerge
        diff premerge postmerge

Would that cover you? I don't know how badly diff is going to be confused by
being fed sources in diff format.

>
> Effectively, a "state" has been lost. There's no record of the local
> modifications *before* the update. What happens if everything goes wrong
> following the merge? It's impossible to revert to the premerged state.
>

This may be an unsolvable problem (without the use of branches). You either
trust the merging/conflict algorithm to do the right thing, or you don't.
Perhaps the answer is either

   1) use branches for all dev and have a merge manager (or use svk!)
   2) run 'svn up' much more frequently, so that the code drift is much smaller

Better regression testing is always a good idea, but as you said, that isn't
always possible at the granularity you might want.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747
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