RE: Deleting or Renaming a Branch

[Arthur Barrett]

Jake,


> > Don't you just want to move the old branch to the new HEAD?
> > cvs tag -F -b MY_NEW_BRANCH
> 
> Actually, I just want to pretend as if I never cut the branch in the
> first place.  We 
.
.
.
> What I'd like to do is totally blow away PROJECTX as if it
> never existed.  Then I would like to cut a new PROJECTX from HEAD so
> that the project will be based on the latest code from HEAD.

Yes - that is 'move the old branch to the new HEAD'.

Deleting a branch requires use of the 'cvs admin' commands, and as a
general rule of thumb if you ever have cause to type 'cvs admin' then
it's probably time to go home and come back with a better idea.  In 15
years of administering CVS and CVSNT repositories I've never had to use
'cvs admin'.

Now moving branch tags is not something to be done lightly, but since
you already know that you've nto used PROJECTX branch then it should be
OK (of course having backups of your repository is always a requirement
for any administrative command).  

So from within a sandbox with HEAD checked out: 

   cvs tag -F -b PROJECTX

What this command does is literally move the PROJEXTX branch to the HEAD
revisions, or to put it another way: when you created the PROJEXTX
branch it used the latest revision numbers of each file, you now want it
to do the same thing again - any files that have 'newer' revisions you
want to move the branch to begin at the newer revision. 

I mostly use CVSNT (GPL/Free unix/windows/linux etc just like CVS) which
has a concept called a 'floating branch' where this occurs
automatically.  Ie: if you create PROJECTX branch off HEAD then PROJECTX
consists of the HEAD revisions until a change is made on PROJECTX branch
to that file, ie: the PROJECTX branch 'follows' HEAD revisions until
someone 'breaks' the connection by making a change on PROJECTX.


Regards,


Arthur