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Matt Schuckmann wrote: > Surely there is a need for it or else people like me and whomever > implemented the Move Branch to Head macro in WinCVS wouldn't be doing it. > > If I remember right if a file changes on the main line but not on a > branch when you do a merge from the mainline to the branch a new > revision is created on the branch that is identical to the revision on > the mainline. In my mind this is wasteful and unnecessary. Plus it makes Revisions are a few bytes.. even if it created hundreds, even thousands of them it wouldn't make any difference. What is important is reproducability - you need to be able to checkout a branch and get *exactly* what you got before, otherwise any testing done is meaningless. That's the whole point of a source control system - and is why it's not uncommon to have the whole build system under revision control, not just the source code. You can't simply move the branches around in many cases - the branch is a delta from the revision that it was created at. Moving branches with revisions on is error prone and IMO dangerous. Magic branches handle the non-revision case for the (rare) cases that it's useful (the original example was template configuration files with customer specific changes to a few of them). Merging is a nontrivial operation for a reason - you can't just take two random branches and stick them together without operator intervention. Tony