Merge conflict?

[Jacob Burckhardt]

Tristan Juricek writes:
> I'm getting a merge conflict when merging files that only have lines
> deleted from the branch to the main repository. 
> 
> Essentially what's happening is that we have a build system here that
> automatically creates user branches for doing work.  One of the users
> made some large deletions to one of his files, then attempted to release
> those changes.  The files that contain the merge conflicts only show
> that those exact sections had been deleted.
> 
> I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior.

It sounds like it might be the same bug for which one of the cvs
maintainers checked in a fix last week.

>  I can't post the
> actual file that had problems, do to it's proprietary (and very
> important) status.

Try using the command below on the file.  It changes it enough that it
probably no longer has any significant private info in it, but yet it
is usually still possible to reproduce merge bugs with it:

sed 's/[a-zA-Z]/x/g' < file > file_changed

>  I've been unable to simulate the changes as well
> (much to my frustration).

The author of the bug fix, Karl Tomlinson, thought that there are
still some cases which his patch does not handle, so it might be good
to try to test your case on Karl's patch.  I will be glad to help you
do that testing if you send me your files after changing with the
"sed" command.

Karl's patch is here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-cvs@gnu.org/msg00554.html