[cvsnt] Re: virtual branches ?

Bo Berglund Bo.Berglund at system3r.se
Wed Oct 19 17:23:47 BST 2005


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I don't remember asking to move branches with revisions on them, that 
would be a stupid thing to do. I'll try to say it again: It would be 
nice to have a command that floats branch tags for files which do not 
have revisions on that branch yet. This is very similar to the magic 
branch  concept with the exception that you have control over when the 
float happens. This would be an operation done just before merging from 
the trunk to a branch.
The idea being you are starting work on some task so you create a 
branch, you  modify a few files and check them in to your branch. Mean 
while changes have continued to happen on the trunk. At some point you 
feel that the changes on the trunk are stable enough that you want to go 
through the "expense" and additional testing of bring those changes into 
your branch for your benefit and testing. First you float the branch tag 
for the files which have changed on the trunk but not in your branch 
then you preform the normal merge operation, maybe it should just be 
part of the merge with a special option to indicate that you want to 
float unbranched files.

----- my comments below (using Outlook, which wants to top post... -----

I have been reading this conversation for some time without understanding
at all what it was all about...

But maybe I have realized it now, please tell me if I got it right:

Matt,
what you propse is that when you create a branch off of HEAD then what you
want is that all files in the branch should stay on HEAD as long as you do
not edit them in a sandbox located on the branch.
This way these files do not need to be constantly merged from the moving
HEAD state in order to keep the alternate development up to date on the
files that you are *not* editing on the branch.
But at the moment you edit such a file on the branch then it will get the
branch revision when you commit it based on what was current for this file
when the commit was done. After this the only way to get HEAD changes into
it is the normal merge from TRUNK.

Is this what this is all about?

If so then I too think it would be a valuable possibility when you branch
off from HEAD to test a new idea or similar and later merge it back if it
was successful. Often such things are done only on a few files and they
need the other files to stay in synch with TRUNK.
We do this often and we need to constantly merge the branch from TRUNK in
order to stay current and reduce the merging problems once we get to the
end of the process.

If I got it right then I was grossly misled by the strange name "float"
you gave to the branching idea...

/Bo



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