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

[Tony Hoyle]

Bo Berglund wrote:
> Which is why you need to get the other developer's effort merged into
> *your* development branch and basically setting a new branch point.
> I see this as if the feature development was started at a later time
> from the point where the new merge was done. Thus it will now be based
> on this later branch point and therefore the final merge back will be
> simplified a lot.

The point being that is *isn't* simplified.

Because the merge has to take into account everything that happened from the 
branchpoint you end up having to resolve possibly hundreds of conflicts.  Even 
the cleverness of cvs merging isn't going to cope well with a branch that's 
got bits of old and new code mixed.

In the worst case someone else has to do this and screws up your code by 
getting one of the merges wrong.

If you hadn't branched in the first place this would be completely unnecessary 
- in fact you would know all along that your code worked with the current tree 
with no extra effort.

Of course you commit every day.. nobody's saying that you don't.  The fact is 
that short of breaking the compile completely (which is pretty rare since you 
need to compile it yourself) there really isn't a justification for keeping 
things separate.

Tony