Question

We use CVS currently and develop new features on a branch before merging to trunk. Occasionally we get merge conflicts caused by the CVS keyword substitution. So when reviewing the conflict file we see something like this

<<<<<<< collect_logs.conf
# CVS $Id: collect_logs.conf,v 1.6 2010/02/03 16:43:11 peterw Exp $
=======
# CVS $Id: collect_logs.conf,v 1.13 2010-05-07 17:14:43 peterw Exp $
>>>>>>> 1.13

And that will be the only conflict in the file.

I have done a little bit of investigating and as you probably notice there is a slight difference in the formatting of the date in the entry. This is due to different cvs version being used over different platforms (one on Solaris, the other on Linux) I believe that is what’s triggering the conflict.

The workaround is to simply do a fresh checkout of the project and then to do the cvs update from there. As all the keywords are generated in the same format it is happy to merge.

My Question is can you command cvs to cope better with merging on the keyword substitutions. Or is it simply better to avoid it with fresh checkouts like I have?

Thanks

Peter

Answer 1

You would use update -kk ... as per the CVS documentation on Merging and keywords(section 5.10).

The k attached to the -k (keyword substitution mode) causes CVS to just output the keyword and not the value of the keyword. So in theory your multiple date formats shouldn’t be a problem. I haven’t tested this theory though.