Re: How does one change the identity of the HEAD (trunk) ?

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 03:38:12PM -0400, Donald Sharp wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 19, 2002 at 08:37:38PM +0100, Julian Seward wrote:
> > Now what we want to do is to throw away, in effect, the current HEAD
> > and turn the interesting ERASER branch into the HEAD.  
>
> Why not just merge the changes on branch ERASER into main?

Because there's cruft on the trunk that they want to abandon?
Sounds as though they want not a merge, but a wholesale
replacement.

Here's what to do:
  - Ideally, back up your repo first in case you screw up :-)

  - Check out two fresh sandboxes, one on the trunk and one on
    the ERASER branch

  - Create (release) tags from both of them

  - Overlay the content of the ERASER sandbox onto the CVS
    metadata from the TRUNK sandbox

  - CD into the TRUNK sandbox
  
  - Verify that what you've done makes sense

  - Do any necessary "cvs add"s and "cvs remove"s

  - Commit

  - Create another release tag from the TRUNK sandbox

All those tags are for posterity -- so that, in the distant
future, you'll be able to tell which revisions of any given file
were involved in the operation.

As to what I mean by "overlay", see my info-cvs message of
4-Jul-2002, with subject "cvs repository confusion"; it was
written for a different situation, but it should be clear how to
map the procedure to yours.

(Darn, I keep referring people to that message -- far more often
than I've ever done the thing myself :-)  Sooner or later, I'm
going to have to write it up as a proper FAQ entry...)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
The acronym for "the powers that be" differs by only one letter
from that for "the pointy-haired boss".