On 05 Oct 2007 11:04:38 -0700, Dennis Jones wrote: > > "Ted Stern" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > >> At this point, I want to check to make sure no changes have gone into >> the trunk between BRANCHNAME_MERGE_HEAD and right now. >> >> So my first naive thought is to do a diff. Note that I'm currently >> sitting in my branchname sandbox: >> >> cvs diff -r BRANCHNAME_MERGE_HEAD -r HEAD 1>stdout 2>stderr > > I'm not sure why nobody eslse has suggested this, but since > BRANCHNAME_MERGE_HEAD always refers to a point on the trunk and you want to > diff the trunk, why not go to the trunk and do the diff from there? IOW, > instead of sitting on your branch and trying to do the diff from there, just > switch over to the trunk and do it. That way, HEAD will refer to the trunk > instead of the branch, and your diff should work as expected. > > Am I missing something? > > - Dennis >
Here's the issue. We're trying to set up scripts to automate most aspects of branching and merging for users who seldom use CVS. And we also want to provide a standardized front end so that we can eventually switch to subversion without having a huge retraining time for the users. In this transitional period, we want to keep the users from having to wait while a thousand files get tagged or updated. And since a user will typically be working on their own branch, we want to avoid requiring them to have a trunk (or parent branch) checkout in addition to the bug checkout. When working properly, cvs diff is a pretty fast way to detect differences between branches, and is also easy to parse. To do what you suggest, the user would have to do a 'cvs update -dA' [or 'cvs update -d -r parentbranch' if not branching from the trunk]. This can take almost as long as tagging. Then they would have to 'cvs update -d -r branchname' to get back to the branch checkout they were working on. The other question is whether HEAD will mean what _YOU_ think it means, even when you are in a trunk checkout. If it always points to the most recently checked in version, even if it is not on the current branch, then the same problem will still apply. Ted -- dodecatheon at gmail dot com Frango ut patefaciam -- I break so that I may reveal
