Branch Management Issue

[Jake Colman]

We do all development on project-specific branches.  When projects are
completed, they are merged to HEAD and then the release branch (and,
possibly, other active project branches) synchronize with the HEAD.  When a
branch is to be created, we create a ROOT-OF tag on the head for the branch.
When a branch completes, we tag the tip of that branch.  To bring the project
branch into the HEAD, we merge all changes from the ROOT-OF tag through the
tip.  This process has worked well for us for years.

Now we have a problem.

Given three branches: SIV, SFP, P51.  Work was done in SFP that we wanted to
make available in SIV and the P51 release branch.  SFP was brought to HEAD
and over to SIV and P51.  New files created in SFP now exist, of course, in
SIV where they were additionally modified for the purposes of the SIV
project.  Let's call those files xxx.cc and yyy.cc

We just merged SIV to HEAD using the ROOT-OF process described above.  Since
xxx.cc and yyy.cc were introduced to SIV via SFP, they do not contain the
ROOT-OF tag for SIV.  Therefore, when I merged all the changes from
ROOT-OF-SIV through the tip, it did not merge in the SIV-specific changes
made to those files.

So, what do I do now?

1) How can I identify those SIV files that are missing the ROOT-OF tag so
   that I can see if there are changes that did not get carried over?

2) What can/should I do differently so that I won't have this issue?

Thanks!

...Jake

-- 
Jake Colman
Sr. Applications Developer
Principia Partners LLC
Harborside Financial Center
1001 Plaza Two
Jersey City, NJ 07311
+1 (201) 209-2467
www.principiapartners.com