Simple win32 batch file for "advanced" merging [was: A failed attempt to introduce Subversion]

[Folker Schamel <sc...@spinor.com>]

Alexander L. Belikoff wrote:
 > The second annoyance was the fact that SVN effectively mandates the user
 > performing the merge to explicitly specify two revisions, the diff between
 > which would be applied to the target revision. While merge is no trivial
 > operation by any means, having a number of usable strategies implemented
 > would definitely help. In this particular case, at least having an ability to
 > merge the changes from another branch using common ancestor as a starting
 > point would help. Or, having a symbolic name for a revision number from which
 > the named branch was derived (e.g. /fooproject/branches/mychanges@BIRTH)
 > would also help. True, this could be all scripted on top of SVN but that
 > would be complex and error-prone.

Attached a trivially simple win32 batch file for managing
the last merged revision and performing the merge.
Maybe it is useful to someone else, too.
Assuming that you set suitable default values in the script,
you simply execute the script, potentially resolve conflicts,
and commit to merge recent changes from trunk into your branch.
Because I'm currently working on a branch, I use it very often,
and it is very simple and not error-prone at all.
It's really trivial!
(And probably would be even more trivial under Unix/Linux.)

Of course, having such functionality already built-in in subversion
will be nice; however as long as you can implement this functionality
by trivial scripts, I don't see a serious problem there.

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
 > Did you read chapter 4 in the book?  Granted, it's occasionally annoying
 > to have to figure out the exact 2 revisions to compare in order to
 > perform a merge, but no more so than in CVS.  ('cvs up -j N -j M
 > foo.c').  When I do a merge in CVS (a backport of a bugfix, for
 > example), it's actually *harder*, because I need to run 'cvs up -j -j'
 > on every single file in my non-atomic changeset(s), and discover the
 > exact revisions of every file to compare.  With SVN, you find 2 versions
 > of the entire branch-tree, and a single merge command gives you all the
 > changes at once.  It's much easier than CVS in that regard.  (See
 > example further down this mail.)

Actually it's not so hard in CVS, because you can tag the last merged
state, so that you also only need one merge command plus one
command move the tag.

Cheers,
Folker