Re: The essential problems of moving from CVS

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, Thomas Adam wrote:
> > Particular Git features I can think of that I think most developers
> > would agree would be big wins are:
> >
> >     * much, much better branch maintenance support, particularly for
> >     multiple merges from one branch to another;
>
> The multple merging is probably something you never want to do, IMO.

Multiple merging is something that we often want to do (for example,
from -current to a long-lived feature branch).  Fortunately, git
supports that just fine.

> But yes, branches and merging in Git are painless.

Well, painless if you want to merge all changes from one branch into
another branch.  But if you want to cherry-pick just a few changes,
things get difficult.  "git cherry-pick" can be used to copy a changeset
from one branch to another, but it doesn't record meta-data saying
what it has done (except as text in the log message).  In the NetBSD
release process, individual changesets are cherry-picked from -current
to branches all the time, and it would be good to have a repository
visualisation tool that could show which changes have or have not been
merged.

Cherry-picking just one file from a changeset that affects multiple
files is even more difficult, but fortunately that is not often done
in the NetBSD release process.

--apb (Alan Barrett)