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Re: 2-way merging - bad?

From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman_at_collab.net>
Date: 2005-06-22 20:55:37 CEST

On Jun 22, 2005, at 1:41 PM, John Browne wrote:
>
> However, others say it is best to only do 1-way merges. I'm trying to
> understand any limitations that exist with this....for a future
> project we will be doing using subversion.

There's no right or wrong answer. It's generally safest to merge all
in one direction, then all in the other direction. If you start
merging selected bits in both directions somewhat randomly, it's more
likely to produce conflicts from repeated-merges.

As someone already said, distributed systems like arch or svk are
designed to track patches (and merges) from the beginning, so they're
much better at this sort of "cherry-picking" back and forth.
Subversion will get there too, someday.

In my experience, I find that the best pattern for a long-lived
feature branch is to merge *all* of trunk to the branch every week.
I make sure to merge contiguous ranges of trunk, always picking up
from the last merge-point. Then, when the branch is finished, I
merge the whole branch back to trunk by directly comparing trunk and
branch.

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Received on Wed Jun 22 21:00:39 2005

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