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Re: merging back branch from trunk

From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman_at_collab.net>
Date: 2004-06-24 21:36:13 CEST

On Thu, 2004-06-24 at 13:19, Patrick Dean Rusk wrote:
> I shudder to contradict Ben, but I don't think his response is correct.

Am I that intimidating? :-)

>
> I recently did a lot of work in a Subversion branch that affected about 500
> files of a 2500 file project that was actually stored in PVCS. Over the
> three weeks I did branch work, I was careful to merge changes daily from the
> PVCS trunk into my Subversion trunk and then into my Subversion branch. At
> the end, all trunk changes were represented in the branch, as well as my own
> changes.
>
> Having done that, the final merge was a simple command to merge the HEAD of
> my branch into the HEAD of trunk. In other words, leave off all revision
> information entirely. That essentially replaces trunk with the contents from
> the branch, which is what you want to do if you've been careful to
> continually keep the branch up-to-date with trunk changes.

This scenario works only if you know that all changes in the trunk are
already in the branch, because in the end, you're effectively converting
the trunk into a perfect copy of the branch! If the trunk contains
*any* change that isn't in the branch, then that change will be
*removed* when you run a merge command that compares the tips of both
branches.

That scenario doesn't seem so common to me; after all, most lines of
development truly diverge in different directions. In the scenario you
describe, you're going through very specific measures to guarantee that
the branch is always a strict "superset" of the trunk. I've never seen
any other group live by such a strict policy. Maybe I've not seen
enough of the world. :-)

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Received on Thu Jun 24 21:39:11 2004

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