branching

[Keith Seitz]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2002, Kevin Buettner wrote:

> Maybe I'm being naive, but why can't you just checkout your branch,
> and then do:
> 
>     cvs update -j HEAD

Because CVS will continue to try to merge all changes into the branch 
from the time the branch was created, and you'll get tons of conflicts for 
a bunch of changes that were already merged. When you tag the mainline and 
use the two "-j" options telling CVS to merge from point A to point B, it 
only merges the new changes.

You can see this, for example, by checking out a branch and doing an 
update of a single file, once with just "-j HEAD" and once with "-j OLD -j 
NEW". For example, on my interpreter branch, valops.c was taken from 
version 1.59. When I do "cvs -q update -j HEAD" on this file, it says 
"Merging differences between 1.59 and 1.75 into valops.c". Well, I've 
already merged through version 1.69 previously, and now there are 
conflicts in the file. But when I use "-j OLD" "-j NEW", it merges only 
between 1.69 and 1.75 with no conflicts.

FWIW, David, your procedure is exactly the procedure that I've been using 
in my interpreter branch.

Keith