[Svnmerge] svnmerge and status --show-updates

[Archie Cobbs]

Giovanni Bajo wrote:
> svnmerge.py currently runs a "svn status --show-updates" and makes sure there
> are no pending updates on the repository before doing a merge. It inherited it
> from what the old bash script used to do. I was wondering what people think
> about this. My view:

It was originally done this way to avoid the danger of someone
inadvertently committing a change that was not actually part of
a merged patch, and not realizing it, which could lead to much
hair pulling in the future when something ended up working strangely.

So the point was not to ensure the repository was up to date, but
rather to ensure nothing but the merged patches were included in
the upcoming commit, i.e., there were no outstanding changes.
The message displayed is misleading, it should complain that
there are "oustanding changes" rather than "not up to date".

This was not an absolute requirement or anything, just a conservative
design choice at the time.

I don't see any problem with doing the merge and update in either
order, but it seems safer to require "--force" if someone wants to
mix together local mods plus merged patches.. .other thoughts?

-Archie

__________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs      *        CTO, Awarix        *      http://www.awarix.com