Re: branch proposal

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 08:37:19AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > I'm still comming to terms with git, but SCM tools I've worked with in
     > the past normally make it possible to have a branch which
     > *automatically* inherits changes which are commited to its parent (ie
     > the thing it branches from).  Isn't this possible with git?
     
     I don't understand how it could work with any SCM.  Isn't there
     always the possibility for merge conflicts that have to be
     resolved by hand?

Yes.  There is always that possibility, and obviously if that happens,
then what I described won't work.  But in the simpler case, (where a
file is touched in the parent, but not in the branch) the branch will
receive the changes from the parent.  If the file is touched in both,
then it'll attempt to merge; if there's a conflict then that'll have
to be resolved by hand as you say.

What confuses me about your proposal, if I understand it correctly, is
that changes checked into the "development" branch will also appear in
the "bug fix" branch whether we want them to or not. Usually it's not
what we want; we want the opposite.
 
     Which SCM tools make this possible, and under what name?

I was thinking of aegis.  I don't think it has a special name for this
feature, because it's the default.  It's possible to override this
behaviour by copying the relevant files from parent to the branch.

J'

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