[Gnu-arch-users] Sparse `replay' and `star-merge'

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

It looks that I encountered a badly-handled corner case for
`star-merge'.  But I may as well have simply missed something, so I'd
welcome help.

I'm trying to star-merge my branch with a branch that selectively
replayed _non-contiguous_ patches from my branch:

  $ tla merges HIS-BRANCH MY-BRANCH
  patch-19        patch-4
  patch-19        patch-5
  patch-20        patch-1
  patch-20        patch-2
  patch-21        patch-8
  patch-22        patch-9

Now if I run `tla star-merge HIS-BRANCH', changes that I made in
MY-BRANCH--patch-7 (which hasn't been merge in HIS-BRANCH) are simply
undoed:

  $ tla star-merge HIS-BRANCH
  * star-merge by delta(MY-BRANCH--patch-9,HIS-BRANCH--patch-22)[/home/...]
  [...]
  D  {arch}/.../MY-BRANCH/MY-ARCHIVE/patch-log/patch-7
  [...]


Apparently, `star-merge' saw that MY-BRANCH--patch-9 was merged into
HIS-BRANCH and made the wrong assumption that _all_ patches prior to
MY-BRANCH--patch-9 had been merged into HIS-BRANCH.

Is this analysis correct?

If it is, is there a way to get around this beside selective replays?

Even better: could `star-merge' be fixed to handle such cases?

Thanks,
Ludovic.