merging unrelated branches

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Aaron Bentley wrote:
> 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
> 
> 

Well, we had also determined that you could use a cache of the file ids,
and then only read the file when the stat changed. That was never
actually implemented, though.

At the moment you can do things like:

bzr add --file-ids-from=../other/branch

Which will try to match up files and use the same file id.

John
=:->

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