Re: [Caml-list] [OT] Rant about VCS: Conclusions

[Erik de Castro Lopo <ocaml-erikd@mega-nerd.com>]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 14:03:30 -0800
Blair Zajac <blair@orcaware.com> wrote:

> Regarding merging, unlike CVS, Subversion has changesets, so merging is 
> simply picking the changeset(s) you want from one path and applying it 
> to another:

Ahh, now I remember the problem subversion has with merging across 
branches with respect to Arch.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but from what I have heard, 
subversion is not able to recognise if a changeset has already
been applied or not and trying to apply a changeset which has
already been applied can lead to merge conflicts which need 
manual intervention to correct.

Arch OTOH keeps a log of all changesets applied to a tree. That 
means that if you have three branches A, B and C, all with the same
common ancestor you can merge A -> B and then B -> C. Now if you
try to merge A -> C Arch is clever enough to figure out which
changesets in A have already been applied to C and which ones 
haven't, and then only apply the ones that have not been applied.


Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam@mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
I have found that good programmers either do not make the kind
of mistakes that Ada can prevent, or insert enough checks that
they catch those mistakes about as efficiently as an Ada
environment can. At that point, the use of Ada gives no further
productivity advantage.