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Re: am I misunderstanding what HEAD refers to?


From: Ted Stern
Subject: Re: am I misunderstanding what HEAD refers to?
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:03:39 -0700
User-agent: Gnus/5.110007 (No Gnus v0.7) Emacs/22.1.50 (gnu/linux)

Hi Larry,

On 04 Oct 2007 12:50:21 -0700, Larry Jones wrote:
>
> Ted Stern writes:
>> 
>> Does HEAD mean different things with different cvs commands?
>
> As far as I remember, diff is the only odd-ball: it interprets HEAD as
> the head of the current branch rather than as the head of the trunk. 
> It's "always" worked that way and we've been loathe to change it for
> fear of causing upward compatibility problems.

Aha.  Okay, I can live with this.  It does seem odd, though.  I'm
curious how the diff exception came about.  If anybody knows a
historical reason for this, I'd be very interested!

My current best option for detecting whether a merge is necessary,
without changing anything, appears to be a 'cvs -n' merge, then parse
the output.

>
>> Is there any other way of specifying the trunk as a branch, using
>> some symbolic name?
>
> Not as a synbolic name, but as long as you haven't screwed with the
> revision numbers (which you shouldn't), you can use the numeric
> revision 1.

Actually, I tried this.  Unfortunately, in the ancient repository I
was looking at, some goofballs incremented the numeric revision on
some files, as high as 6 in some cases.  This may be an artifact of
directly copying some old RCS version controlled files into the
repository a long time back.

Ted
-- 
 dodecatheon at gmail dot com
 Frango ut patefaciam -- I break so that I may reveal




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