Re: BIG update to code, can CVS help?

[Kaz Kylheku]

In article <address@hidden>, address@hidden wrote:
>
>This group was able to come up with a solution to my last problem,
>so Im trying again with this one.
>
>I have a subroutine that I maintain, and I just received an 'update'
>from a user.
>
>The diff from the original to the users version goes on 40 pages (sigh).
>
>Now its not really that bad, a good deal of this is just
>    o Changes to captilisation of comments.
>    o Reformatting of comments
>    o Spelling errors in comments...
>    o changes to a few variable names to better reflect their usage.
>
>The rest I would like to look at more carefully.
>
>Is there any way that CVS can help me incrementally apply this change
>to the code, noting that I want to be able to compile and test at each
>stage of the game?

No. If you want to incrementally apply a large change, obtain a context
diff, then split out the hunks into separate files, and apply them
individually with the patch program.

If you do them in reverse order, it should go better, since the line
numbers following a change can be affected. Patch is reasonably smart
in figuring out where to apply a change even if the lines have moved,
but why take chances.

Try to patch the version that is identical to what the user started with.
That way you won't have to deal with patch failures.  Make a branch at
that point in the file's CVS history, and commit the changes there. Then
do a merge to integrate the changes with your latest version.