At my work we have a common problem dealing with merges. I've tried google for and discussion of our plight, so feel free to redirect me to a current discussion if one is available.
The scenario is this:
Active development takes place on the trunk (mainline, whatever you want to call it). When we are close to a release, we branch. This is a defensive branch to protect the release from continuing development. Once the release goes out (with only minor fixes specific to the release) we merge that back to the trunk.
All well and good.
BUT, suppose I make a change in the branch that I also need in the trunk to support continuing development? Simple example: I make the same change in a file in the branch and in the trunk. When we do the merge later, WinCVS throws up its hands and doesn't know how to merge the changes.
This is a major sore point for our release guy as it adds many manual steps during the merge.
Is there some way we can do a merge and have WinCVS understand that the same changes were made in both the branch and the trunk?