Re: CVS corrupts binary files ...

[Paul Sander]

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>[ On Tuesday, June 8, 2004 at 16:21:03 (-0700), Mark D. Baushke wrote: ]
>> Subject: Re: CVS corrupts binary files ... 

>> It may be that the diff3 algorithm is not always
>> the best one suited to do such mergers. 

>That may be true, but the use of the traditional diff and diff3
>algorithms for detecting and merging changes in the managed files is a
>direct concequence of the fact CVS is built on top of RCS and RCS has no
>alternative to using, and no _real_ way to specify any alternative, to
>these algorithms (at least not without breaking RCS compatability).

Although the earliest releases of CVS used the rcsmerge program to
perform merges, I think you'll agree that the following are
equivalent:

        rcsmerge -pversion1 -pversion2 file

versus:

        co -pversion1 > temp1
        co -pversion2 > temp2
        diff3 -E -am file temp1 temp2

Current releases of CVS do the latter.  (Don't believe me?  Look at
the function named RCS_merge in the rcscmds.c source file.)  It's a
simple matter to replace the invocation of diff3 with a different tool.

Given this, statements like the following do nothing but spread FUD.
They are flatly false, and you would do the world a big favor if you
would stop writing them.

>It might be desirable but it's not really possible without giving up on
>the use of RCS in the back-end -- or at least without giving up on
>backwards compatabiltiy with other RCS tools.

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