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Re: Merging Branches

From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman_at_collab.net>
Date: 2004-09-03 17:49:30 CEST

I don't think you meant to send this reply to me personally. Resending
back to users@.

On Fri, 2004-09-03 at 10:31, Russ Brown wrote:
> To answer two posts at the same time...
>
> On Fri, 03 Sep 2004 09:51:54 -0500, Ben Collins-Sussman
> <sussman@collab.net> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 2004-09-03 at 09:47, Jacob Atzen wrote:
> >
> >> I'm no expert but it seems like your suggestion number 1 is "The Right
> >> Way"(tm). I assume you've read the books chapter on merging?
> >>
> >> <http://svnbook.red-bean.com/svnbook/ch04s03.html>
> >>
>
> Yes I did, but as is often the case the chapter provides plenty of
> information on the more simple use cases but not on the more complex cases
> that tend to cause me to turn to the manual. :-)
>
> >> Your number 2 might work if you haven't changed the lines containing
> >> your trunk to branch merges:
> >>
> >> When patching a file, Subversion typically notices if the file
> >> already has the change, and does nothing.
> >
> > Congrats, Russ. You've just discovered why Subversion really needs a
> > merge-tracking feature. :-)
> >
> > If Subversion were anything like clearcase, you'd simply say, "hey,
> > please merge my branch back into trunk", and the system would
> > automatically know which changes already existed in both branch and
> > trunk, and skip over them for you.
> >
>
> Well, I tried them both.
>
> 1. Was indeed a nightmare, and I ended up with a whole load of conflicts
> to deal with. I tried reverting the WC and ended up with one that wouldn't
> even let me do svn info. Not good!
> 2. Actually worked ok. I had a few conflicts, but nothing that I'd call a
> nightmare.
>
> So in this case it worked out ok, but in a situation with many developers
> working on separate branches merging to trunk and back, a similar
> situation will arise often and may not be so easily dealt with.
>
> Are there any plans to add a merge tracking feature to Subversion, and if
> so is there a planned version that it might appear in? From my evaluations
> so far this is the only aspect of Subversion that I have doubts about:
> everything else appears to be just what we're looking for (I did try arch
> for a while before this but got frustrated with weird conventions, lack of
> useful documentation and the attitudes of some of the developers).

Yes, there are absolutely plans to add this feature. Come back in a
year, and see how far we are. We're going to get reserved checkouts
(locking) done first. "Merge tracking" is a phrase that could apply to
a dozen different problems, and this is just one of them. It's a
tremendous task to design and implement.

FWIW, CVS dosen't have merge-tracking either. But we decided it was
better to release Subversion 1.0 after 4 years (with the advantages it
*does* have over CVS) rather than wait another 2 years to add
merge-tracking. :-)

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Received on Fri Sep 3 17:50:56 2004

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