Re: [Gnu-arch-users] star-merge after independent branch (of version number)

[David Allouche]

On Sat, 2005-03-12 at 23:05 -0600, Rob Browning wrote:
> Imagine that you have two users (A and B), one working on branch
> A/foo--bar--1 and one working on branch B/foo-bar--1.  The latter
> branch was tagged from the former, and the two users have been
> star-merging back and forth for a while.
> 
> Now imagine that it's time to start working on the new version,
> foo--bar--2, but for whatever reason, both users independently created
> their own foo--bar-2 by tagging from their own foo--bar--1.
> 
> Given that, is it possible to arrange for these users to continue
> star-merging between their two, new foo--bar--2 branches?  (By default
> star-merge thinks they're unrelated[1].)
> 
> Graphically the arrangement should look like this:
> 
>   A/foo--bar--1  --tag-->  B/foo--bar--1
>           |                        |
>          tag                      tag
>           |                        |
>            > A/foo--bar--2          > B/foo--bar--2
> 
> 
> [1] I know there are ways to alter that (--reference, join-tree,
>     etc.), but I didn't know if those actions would be appropriate
>     here.

That is a limitation of star-merge.

FAI's merge implemented the star-merge algorithm but was not limited by
branch points like that.

Bazaar's merge does something very different from star-merge and should
just do the Right Thing here.

If you insist on using star-merge, you should use "--reference
X/foo--bar--1" (where X is the archive of the tree-version) for the
first merge.

> Finally, if the above situation is just considered one you should
> avoid, then what's the recommended alternate practice -- avoid that
> kind of parallel, independent branching, avoid star-merge?

The above situation was not considered to be avoided, you just had to
know how to use --reference.

> (I had thought that you usually wanted to try star-merge first, but the
>  limitations mentioned in the wiki sound fairly substantial (no
>  cherrypicking, can't handle "same time merges", etc.).)

baz merge aims at removing those limitations.

Star-merge is a simple and very predictible merge algorithm. It's a very
useful sharp knife, but it's definitely not DWIM in the general case.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa

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