Re: CVS merge does not detect changes between HEAD and branch

[Stuart Cooper]

> > So, it's important to tag the committed result of every merge, avoiding
> > race conditions (i.e. use "cvs tag" on the workspace from which the
> > merge was committed, not "cvs rtag"), and use that tag as the ancestor
> > for the next merge.  This is explained somewhere in the documentation.

> Thank you for (re-) explaining it to me. Now, I even remember WHY I
> always tag the point which I merged. ;)

Some developers once drummed the following useful phrase into my head:
"Tags are Cheap"

We were mergeing things in from a branch to the head, and on the head
we'd tag it
v3_1_22_preMerge
do the merge
v3_1_22_merged
resolve the conflicts
v3_1_22
and for good measure
v3_1_22_postMerge

That's 4 tags for an operation that you could sometimes get by with one or two
for. Tags are Cheap. You can have a ton of tags on a file in your
repository and the
only dreadful expense is a lot more output in cvs log filename than
you're used to.

Using a new tag (tags are cheap) is a whole lot better than moving an existing
tag with tag -f. Which is another matter to what's under discussion here, but
another important one.

Stuart.