[Monotone-devel] merge chaos nodes

[Hugo Cornelis]

Hi all,


We are using monotone from a cron job that runs a script that pulls
revisions of a single branch from a remote 'central repository' into a
'local repository'.  Then the script attempts to do a local merge in
case the pull resulted in more than one head, and then it runs a
number of tests on the checked out source code.  The script never
pushes nodes to the central repository.

However, occasionally, the local repository gets into a state where
each pull that delivers a new node, generates two heads, even when the
central repository has only one head, so every pull also generates a
new local merge node.  This behavior not only generates twice as many
nodes as expected, but it also makes a mess of the revision ancestry
tree on the local repository.  Additionally we suspect that sometimes
this merge chaos also results in local conflicts that cannot be solved
remotely (see posts we did in December under the subject 'merge
conflicts').

The easy solution is not to do local merges.  The undesirable result
of this decision would be a reduction of the frequency of running the
tests.  So we would really like to understand why and in what
circumstances such a local merge can lead to an unresolvable merge
chaos.

At first I thought that maybe this is related to a particular order of
commits generated on different remote repositories, pushed to the
central repository, and then pulled into the local repository, but I
am not sure if that is possible at all.  Am I correct that this may
happen?  If so, is there an easy way to prevent this?  Or are the
local merge nodes caused by other events?

As a second question, is it possible that additional events can lead
to a local merge conflict that cannot be resolved remotely?

Any suggestions?

PS. the central and local repositories can be made available.


-- 

Hugo


--

                    Hugo Cornelis Ph.D.

              Neurospaces Project Architect
                http://www.neurospaces.org/

                  Research Imaging Center
   University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
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                 San Antonio, TX  78284-6240

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