On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 18:02 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Yah know, the one bit of these pitches that always sounds like pure > snake oil is the claim that they offer some kind of mechanical solution > to merge conflicts. AFAICS that has nothing to do with the SCMS in use > and everything to do with whether your "diff" command is AI-complete.
Did you do any research to support that assertion? The nature and quality of the merge algorithm used actually differs significantly between SCMs. The ability to do history-sensitive merges actually results in a significant reduction in the need for manual conflict resolution. For one example among many, see the discussion around a new proposed merge algorithm for Codeville: http://lists.zooko.com/pipermail/revctrl/2005-May/000005.html http://revctrl.org/PreciseCodevilleMerge Or the "Mark Merge" algorithm used by Monotone: http://monotone.ca/docs/Mark_002dMerge.html http://revctrl.org/MarkMerge Claiming that all this amounts to "snake oil" is plainly wrong, I think. > I note also that CVS does have the ability to merge changes across > branches, we just choose not to use it that way. As far as I know, CVS does not provide a way to do a 3-way merge without considerable manual effort (e.g. using a standalone tool to do the actual merge). -Neil ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: You can help support the PostgreSQL project by donating at http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate
