[Gnu-arch-users] question about star-merge and mirrors

[Russell]

Hi,

I'm trying to arrange some distributed archives, but am running into
problems with star-merge and mirrors, probably due to me not
understanding something about it.  What I want is:

- A central archive that contains the authoritative project.

- Local archives on two or more machines that may be laptops, ie they
  are often disconnected.  These local archives are tags from the main
  archive.

- Mirrors of each of the local archives, in a place that remains
  connected.

- Each user can make changes on his own machine, and commit to his own
  archive, then use archive-mirror to essentially keep a backup of that
  repository off the local machine.

- Occasionally, changes from the mirrors can be merged into the main
  archive.

However, star-merge will let me do merges into a central archive working
copy from the local archives, but not into a central archive working
copy from the mirrors of the local archives.  It says

  star-merge: unable to merge unrelated trees.

Now I would have expected that those trees would be related.  The local
archive has a common ancestor with the central archive (the revision at
which it was tagged from the central archive), shouldn't the mirrors
share that common ancestor as well?

But... If (on the machine with one of the local archives) I unregister
the local archive and its mirror, then register the mirror under the
local archive's name (without -MIRROR), I can then merge from the mirror
into the central archive.

I hope that's clear.

What I want is to be able to merge into the central archive from mirrors
of people's local archives, so I don't have to have their local archives
online to do the merging.  But the machine I will be using to do that
will probably also have a local archive (tagged from the central
archive) registered, along with its mirror.

There seem to be a few possible ways around this:

- On one of the local archive machines, use a shell script to register
  the archives in a fashion that star-merge will like, do the merge,
  then restore the archive registrations.

- Do the merging on the machine with the central archive, or on a
  machine that doesn't have the local archives and their mirrors
  registered.

- Compute revisions manually, and use apply-delta to merge from the
  mirror into the central archive working copy.  I don't want to do
  this, it seems very un-arch-like, and I hope noone suggests it.  :)

Has anyone else used another way to do this?  Have I missed something
obvious?




-- 
Russell Steicke

-- Fortune says:
If only I could be respected without having to be respectable.