Merge algorithms

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>

 > > If you ever merge back from trunk into a long-running-branch,
 > > then when you do merge into trunk, a naive "merge source log
 > > entries float to top of merged ChangeLog" algorithm will
 > > certainly result in interleaving the branch log entries with the
 > > trunk entries.  Now what?
 > 
 > Merges from mainline need special (manual) handling of the logs
 > anyway. So nothing is lost here.

My point is that you need a different algorithm depending on the
direction of merge.  If this algorithm is default (eg, using an alias),
you will silently corrupt the logs.  If it's not default, people will
forget to specify the option.