Re: repeated merges from a branch

[david]

> I have reached the point where I need to merge from a branch to main a second
> time with the same file.  The documentation I have found dedicates just enough
> words to say use "cvs checkout -j once -j twice file" and it's the human's
> responsibility to guess the right value for "once".  This strikes me as being 
> a
> real nasty limitation.  There is no meta data preserved to figure this out 
> with?
> -CTH
> 
That is correct.  CVS adheres strictly to the RCS file format, and does
not extend it much.  Therefore, there is no meta data preserved.

What most people do is use a tag for the last merge place.  For
example, where I last worked we had a branch named RELEASE_6_0.
We also had a revision tag RELEASE_6_0_MERGED which marked the
last merged spot.  Since it was SOP there to make changes on the
branch and merge to the trunk, we had a script which did so,
automatically moving the RELEASE_6_0_MERGED tag.  (We also
had another script that moved the tag without merging, in the
relatively rare case of a change on 6.0 that should not go to
the head branch.)

So, while this is annoying, there is a standard CVS practice that
makes up for it.  It is one of the issues addressed in the
Subversion project, whose goal is to be a better CVS.

-- 
Now building a CVS reference site at http://www.thornleyware.com
address@hidden