[Monotone-devel] Multiple projects in one database -- branch confusion

[Steven E. Harris]

Even after using monotone for a while, I'm still confused about how to
keep multiple projects in a single database. Or, rather, I'm confused
about what happens when one attempts to mix and merge content from
separate branches that don't share ancestry.

Say that I start a branch "project.experiment" in my database with
this file structure:

,----[ project.experiment ]
| ./
| | one.txt
| | two.txt
| +-dir/
|     three.txt
`----

Later, I start another branch afresh called "project.prototype" in the
same database with this file structure:

,----[ project.prototype ]
| ./
|   one.txt
|   four.txt
`----

These two projects on separate branches were conceived as being
independent, but now I realize that I'd like to combine them into a
single source tree (maybe also moving some things around).

Does monotone see any relationship between the two files "./one.txt"?
They are in the same place with the same name with respect to some
root directories, but at their conception these two roots had nothing
to do with one another.

Is it possible to merge these two branches? One idea I had to avoid
naming conflicts was to first move most of the content of one branch
under some new root directory, then try merging that into the other
tree to at least get all the files together in the same branch.

Obviously, I'm confused about whether a single database can hold many
separate directory trees (with overlapping names), or if all the
branches are just different views of the same shared tree.


What got me thinking about this is the "deleted stays deleted"
rule. If in my "project.experiment" branch I had at one time created
then discarded a file "five.txt", but I've started using a file in the
"project.prototype" branch also called "five.txt", would merging the
former branch into the latter delete "five.txt" permanently, even
though they were really separate files to begin with?

-- 
Steven E. Harris