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

[Charles Duffy]

On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 17:00, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> Well, yes.  But Arch is better than CVS, so it can do every useful thing
> that CVS can do, right?

That doesn't mean that the useful things that Arch can do but CVS can't
do at all will work with all CVS-derived tree structures. But that said:

The only reason I see that cherry-picking straight from smallfeatures to
mainline would cause trouble later is the effect on a later merge from
release to mainline -- replay with skip-present on would skip merging
any release which has even one of the cherry-picked changes. If you were
to force that patch to merge, though, and manually resolve the conflicts
caused by the double-merging (just as you'd need to do in CVS under the
same circumstances), then you'd still get the desired outcome -- just
with extra work involved.

Using a star-merge-friendly mutually merged set of branches is useful
inasmuch as it lets star merge do all the ugly work -- but if you're
willing to do (CVS-like) manual resolution of spurious conflicts in
places where arch could otherwise avoid them, there's no reason you
can't have any tree structure you'd like.