Re: merging etc

[Miles Bader <miles.bader@necel.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> I think that there are other issues.  For instance, when I make
> related changes in several files, I put them together in the ChangeLog
> file.  But CVS wouldn't know that.
>
> CVS could know that if the files were checked in together,
> but I can't do that with VC, which is the only way I know.

It looks like Stefan has slowly been extending VC to handle multiple
files in various operations, but I don't know if there's a
user-interface for this functionality yet.

However, I don't think that would help -- AFAIK, CVS has essentially no
notion of "multiple file commits", and treats multiple files committed
together more or less as if you had committed them separately (with the
same log message).[1]

If getting rid of ChangeLogs is desirable (and I'm not sure I agree that
it is, even though ChangeLogs are a big pain for merging), really the
only sane thing to do is switch to a better source-control system than
CVS -- and I also think the one that makes sense for Emacs is "git",
though for the time being I'm still using arch for my work on emacs.[2]

   [1] There do seem to be ways you can notice the difference,
e.g. commit email messages seem to batch files which are committed
together, and perhaps the locking behavior is slightly different, but
once things have been committed, I think that information disappears

   [2] Incidentally, since you (Richard) spend a lot of time in
"disconnected" mode, I think you'd personally benefit a lot from
something like git -- it would allow you to do all operations
(committing, merging, log-checking, etc) operations locally, with easy
synchronization once you have access to a network again.

-Miles

-- 
"I distrust a research person who is always obviously busy on a task."
   --Robert Frosch, VP, GM Research