cvs update; merge

[Jimm Grimm]

Hi!

        First I want to say that CVS is way cool, and thank you all for your
hard work.  But of course, I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't have
something to complain about...  ;-)

        In cvs.pdf it says:
> For instance, imagine that you checked out revision 1.4 and started
editing it. 
> In the meantime someone else committed revision 1.5, and shortly after
that 
> revision 1.6. If you run update on the file now, CVS will incorporate all 
> changes between revision 1.4 and 1.6 into your file.
        (2 October 2000 using texi2html 1.56k)

        This sounds like cvs will automatically attempt to merge the
changes.  But instead, it just replaces the copy in my working directory
with, for your example, revision 1.6.  My version gets moved to a temp file
named .#name.version.  If this is all its going to do, we would never get
the
<<<<< file1
stuff1
=======
stuff2
>>>>> file2
annotations mentioned in cvs.pdf.  This type of annotation is what I was
expecting - essentially it would automatically attempt the merge, and
provide a temp file somewhere for a 3-way diff.  I do hope this would be
done via temp files - I want to be able to preview the 3-way merge before I
accept it, because cvs doesn't understand C, matlab, etc.  I don't think
it's a good idea to have cvs directly edit the user's file in the working
directory.  I would like to preview the changes any time two users changed
the same file, regardless of whether they both edited the same lines or not.

        But anyway, enough with my personal preferences!  Right now, it
doesn't seem to be doing anything towards a merge - it just moves my version
to a temp file and replaces it with the other user's version.  I get this
same behavior both in windows 2000 and in linux.  Am I seeing this
correctly?  If so, do you have any plans to incorporate auto-merging and 3
way diff into cvs soon?  Or if it's there already, what am I doing wrong?
How will the gui (I'm using tkdiff) know where the temp files are so it can
display the 3 way diff properly?  Note that a lot of times tkdiff fails to
see there's even a conflict, but I guess that is a problem I need to send to
a different mailing list...

Thanks a lot!

Jimm
__________________________________________
Jimm Grimm, Ph.D.       address@hidden 
Senior Technical Staff                       3G W-CDMA
Wiscom Technologies                      732/340-1540
__________________________________________