[Gnu-arch-users] Star merging with 3 branches

[Aaron Bentley]

Hi there,

We've been using CVS and are experimenting with Arch.  We have three
branches going at the moment, and anything that makes merging easier
would be great.

We're using tla 1.1pre8

I had assumed that Arch kept track of what had been merged so I wouldn't
have to.

I thought once I'd star-merged and committed, attempting the same
star-merge would be a no-op.  That's not how it seems.

Here's our current tree:

mainline
   |
   +-release
       |
       smallfeatures

First, went into mainline and did star-merge project--release--version. 
Then I made CVS bring everything in mainline up to date.  Then I
committed with tla.

So now, mainline should appear to be all of release, plus other
changes.  Now there are changes in smallfeatures that I'd like to import
into mainline.  So I do star-merge
project--smallfeatures--version--patch-2.  And tla attempts to redo a
bunch of the changes that are already present in both the release and
mainline branches.  These changes don't have anything to do with
smallfeatures--version--patch-2.  Smallfeatures inherited these changes
from release.

I tried starmerging smallfeatures--version--patch2 into release, and
this works as I expected--no changes after the first .  

But it seems impossible to convince arch that the changes present in
release should be considered to be present in mainline.  The differences
between mainline and release are much stronger than the differences
between release and 

So basically: have I misunderstood what star-merge is supposed to be
capable of?  I had expected that after a star-merge, you couln't
accidentally re-merge the same changes, but it looks as if you can in
some cases.

Is delta the only way I can pull changes from smallfeatures into
mainline?

TIA

(apologies for the long post)

Aaron

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.