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Preparing to Merge

up: arch

Large and complex projects, worked on by many people, often have a primary development path, with most of the day-to-day work being done on branches.

When it comes time to merge changes with the main development path, there are at least two reasonable expectations and goals:

1 Typically, the person(s) modifying the main branch will be different from the person(s) who wrote the changes being added. When merging from a branch, the person(s) modifying the main branch should expect a smooth merge -- one with no conflicts.

2 The patch set which modifies the main branch should be a clean patch set , which means that it should contain only the desired new code. It should perturb existing code as little as possible so that the patch is easy to review, and easy to merge with other branches.

arch makes it practical to accomplish these goals in the following way:

arch: The arch Revision Control System
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