merging unrelated branches

[Aaron Bentley]

Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> Am Montag, den 22.12.2008, 23:08 -0500 schrieb Stefan Monnier:
>>>>> (you have to specify the revision range manually since there is no 
>>>>> common ancestor)
>>>> Once this happens, do they then have a common ancestor
>>> Yes: the revision you merged (and all its ancestors) will be common.
>> Indeed, but another issue is important: can the merge mark files from
>> each branch as being "the same"?  I.e. if I have foo/bar in one branch
>> and foo/bar in the other, can the merge result (via some conflict
>> resolution) in Bzr knowing that these are "the same file" so that
>> changes to foo/bar in either branch will be merged into the foo/bar of
>> the merged branch?
>> In Arch, this was easy to do by setting the arch-tag (or the
>> .arch-ids/foo.id file) accordingly, but since file-identities seem to be
> I'm not familiar with arch, but was that feature called "file id
> aliases" ? Or is that something different entirely ?

No, this was not file-id aliases.  AFAIK, no VCS supports that.

Arch just made it easy for the user to control the specific file-id
associated with a file.

You could even embed the file-id in the file, and this would ensure that
if you mailed the file to someone else and they "tla add"ed it, it would
have the same file-id as your copy.  This also meant that Arch had to
read the first and last 1K of such files every time it wanted to
determine their id.

Aaron