5.7. Merging

When you want to merge a change that you have made on your development branch into your stable branch, there are many ways that you can do it. One would be to :

• Make a change in the development branch (DEV1) and commit it.
• Copy the development-tagged file to a temporary name
• Update to the live version (HEAD)
• Overwrite the live (HEAD) version of the file with your temporary one
• Commit the result
• Update back to the development version (DEV1)

I do the above so often that I have written a Tcl script for WinCVS that will automatically perform the above steps. And similar shell scripts can probably be easily written to match your development environment.

The above seems to be the easiest way, to me. However, there are other alternatives detailed in the CVS manual in chapter 5, "Branching and merging", that I highly recommend for reading. One method involves specifying the last version that has already been merged into the live branch using a specific version number, date, relative time, or special purpose tag.