Re: parsecvs and unnamed branches

[Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com>]

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On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 17:44 -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:
> I'm getting thousands of messages about unnamed branches and even
> 'unnamed branch from master-UNNAMED-BRANCH'.
> 
> How do you get unnamed branches into CVS, are these check-in errors or
> are people actually working on unnamed branches? Or is parsecvs not
> finding all of the branch info?

branch names rely on a special 'branch tag' in the "symbols" section of
the CVS file, but actual branches are flagged directly in the revision
list. I don't know how it happens, but ,v files often end up with
branches in the revision tree which haven't an associated tag. Go
figure.

For example, in the top level mozilla/Makefile.in,v file, you'll see a
branch from version 1.36 with an initial commit 1.36.2.1. Using the
wacky CVS branch revision numbering scheme, there should be an
associated tag for version 1.36.0.2 (yes, the last two digits are
flipped). But, none is present in the file.

The reverse situation also occurs, with tags for branches that have no
revisions in the file. This case makes sense -- until you make a change
in a file along a branch, there will be no other record in the file of
where the branch came from.

I'd love to figure out a better mechanism for merging these nameless
branches into the resulting repository, but I don't know how to
correlate unnamed branches in one file with unnamed branches in other
files.

The current scheme of making up a fixed name and hoping that there
aren't multiple unmamed branches from the same root is probably fraught
with peril.

-- 
keith.packard@intel.com

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