Maximizing Your Use of CVS: Branching and Merging

Continuing With The Branch

But what if you want to continue developments in the branch? Two choices:
1. Let the old branch simply die, and follow the process earlier to create a new branch ("Release-2-1-branch2"). Simple approach, but leaves other branches around. (No big deal from CVS' point of view.)
2. Continue development in the existing branch. A couple of issues here:
  - If you subsequently try to merge using the method described earlier, all changes in branch will be merged - creating conflicts with changes that have already been merged.
    
    Solution is to use a tag before each merge and then (in the main trunk), use multiple -j options:
    
    $update -j Release-2-1-branch-fix1 -j Release-2-1-branch-fix2
  - Changes made to the main trunk will not be incorporated into the branch. To include those changes, update in the branch copy using the special tag HEAD that refers to the tip of the main trunk.
    
    $ cvs update -kk -j HEAD cvs update: Updating . U Makefile U README RCS file: /home/cvsroot/hello/README,v retrieving revision 1.7 retrieving revision 1.8 Merging differences between 1.7 and 1.8 into README U hello.py RCS file: /home/cvsroot/hello/hello.py,v retrieving revision 1.7 retrieving revision 1.9 Merging differences between 1.7 and 1.9 into hello.py rcsmerge: warning: conflicts during merge $
  - Resolve conflicts and commit the changes to the branch.

Copyright © 2001 Dan York

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