Dangerous Merging
Posted: Wed, 15 August 2007 | permalink | No comments
Andrew Cowie, talking about Orthogonal Patches, believes that having your revision control system assume that patches which are the same text is the same is a good thing:
If X = B [in the java equals() sense], and if Z = D..E, it's no problem, because when the day comes that X and Z are merged to some branch which happens to be the public mainline, and you later pull from that public branch, then X and B will "contend" and merge without conflict, and likewise Z will merge without conflict. It's all the same text. Mission accomplished.
If you think this is right, "think about two different patches each adding a new keyword and also changing the line ``#define NUM_OF_KEYWORDS 17'' to ``#define NUM_OF_KEYWORDS 18''." (example taken from the darcs manual, because I'm not going to come up with a better example than that).
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