[cvsnt] Back-merging unchanged files

[Tony Hoyle]

Prochazka, Jan wrote:
> However, I also think that this behavior is quite problematic. We
> started to use different branch per different developer group to
> separate changes from each others and did merge to head to create the
> release only. But because the trouble with empty changes we could not
> use it as it was virtually impossible to track down the changes.

In that case you're only merging once maybe once a month, and everything 
works as intended - there is no problem with this and it works well.

> The same thing if somebody use branches eg. to separate work on
> particular bug/features and needs to update from HEAD until the branch
> is closed.

This case is merge in a single direction and is a normal way of working 
- I do it quite a lot myself.  There is no issue with this.

> We now create new branch after each merge branch to HEAD. That reduced

That's completely unnecessary.

Where you get problems is if you're trying to merge two branches 
bidirectionally as it creates a lot of revisions for the merges (in this 
case though there probably isn't a point in having both branches and 
it'd be better justto have one).  OTOH you should not be assigning any 
significance to revision numbers *at all* so having a few extra 
revisions isn't really an issue.

Tony