[cvsnt] Re: Branch merging - this seems wrong...

[Tony Hoyle]

Tony Eva wrote:
> If a developer is responsible for implementing a feature of some
> complexity, the coding/testing may take some time.  It would be
> reasonable for them to want to save their intermediate work into
> the repository from time to time, to guard against accidental loss
> of their working copy; so they would wish to perform occasional
> commits of unstable (or even non-functional) code.  They cannot
> commit this to a stable HEAD, and so will instead create a private

That's what you have the development branches for - developers should be 
working on that not the testing/stable branches (in fact in that scenario 
there would *never* be a commit directly to a stable branch).

Once you branch it's a separate line of development - branches are there 
precisely for when you do *not* want to track the commits on the trunk.

> I still believe that the CVSNT behaviour under the bi-directional
> merge scenario is counter-intuitive, and I struggle to see how
> it can be regarded as correct.

It's the only reasonable behaviour.  There's no automatic way to do this and 
absolutely never can be since it's an unsolvable problem.

Tony