At 11:34 PM 4/17/00 -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>The question I originally asked was: would we allow *selective* merge. That
>is, would we permit something less than the entire state of a branch to be
>merged. Arguments for doing a selective merge from trunk to branch:
>
>1. A complete configuration might in principle be a consistent set of
>changes. A subset of this (e.g. merging three of five changed files) almost
>certainly is not.
>2. People want to do it anyway.
>
>This is one of those places where practicality may dictate supporting
>something that is in principle a bad idea.
>
>That said, I can't think of any compelling case for allowing selective merge
>from the branch into the trunk. The only way you can need to do this is
>because you failed to create a branch at some point when you should have
>created one. My personal opinion is that a branch should be merged into its
>parent only as a consistent whole.
I don't think I understand the question.
One model of the integration of changes is the RedHat RPM model. You get a CD with a bunch of modules. You pick which ones you want, and they are loaded into your system. The real magic is that each module specifies which modules it needs and they are automagically loaded.
Another model of integration says that you have a file and if you are going to have change N, you must always have changes 0..N-1. This model seems to be weaker if you are interested in supporting multiple separate development centers which occasionally want to merge their changes.
How do I select Alice's UI changes and Bob's engine changes, but leave out Carol's middleware changes?