Re: [Monotone-devel] Commit a child of 2 parents

[Daniel Carosone]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 06:25:08PM -0500, Ethan Blanton wrote:
> Generally speaking, this is a very reasonable thing to do. 

Agreed on all points, including the fact that merge-via-working-dir
will need to handle such cases.

My comments were related to current monotone, which doesn't have a way
to create such a graph; this hasn't been an issue so far, for the
reasons you outline.

However, I do like the 'cleanliness' of the present model, whereby
merges are fairly minimal (usually entirely trivial) changes.  Maybe
its more a matter of 'best practice' rather than a strict VCS
functionality issue, but in general I prefer that the work for the
kinds of changes you're talking about are done as separate commits in
preparation, such that the actual merge doesn't contain much work.
One reason for this is so that repeated merges/propagates between
development lines is easier.

As another way to illustrate, in present monotone development the
kinds of issues you raise are often handled by multiple propagates
from the mainline to the development branch along the life of the
development branch, before a final "put back" propagate from
development to mainline (or any other similar pair of branches).  Your
description seems to assume a development practice where the branches
diverge just once at the start, and all parallel changes are merged
once at the end.

--
Dan.

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