Bug 165222

In my group, I have the unenviable task of merging changes from one branch into another.  It "appears" that
occasionally, Netbeans doesn't "see" these changes.

This happened today: We have two branches, B1 and B2.  There were a few changes to source files in B1 and I was asked to
merge those changes into B2.  I did the following (which is always my "procedure"):

1) I opened my B1 project in Netbeans, did a CVS Update and clean/build - just to make sure everything was fine.
2) I then marked all the files in B1 with tag T2.  During a previous merge, I had marked the files with T1.
3) I then closed project B1 and opened project B2 (I know there's a "switching to branch" capability, but I don't feel
safe doing that).
4) I go to the root node of my project and right-click CVS->Merge Changes From Branch.  The merge dialog pops up.
5) For "Starting From:" I pick Tag/Revision: T1.
6) For "Until:" I pick Tag/Revision: T2.
7) I hit "Merge".

It finds a bunch of file changes and merges them.  It finds a few that it can't merge automatically and lets me resolve
the conflicts.  I do.  I commit all changes and tell  people all is well.  5 minutes later, a developer asks why one of
her changes in B1 weren't merged in :-(
I try to go to that specific file and do steps 4-7 on it.  Nothing.  I look into the B1 and B2 source directories and do
a UNIX diff on that file - sure enough, they're different.  I ask my Eclipse-toting buddy to do the Eclipse equivalent
to see what he thinks has changed.  He, of course, sees that that file has changed.
I went back to the IDE and inspect what CVS tags are on that file - and notice that this file has no T1 tag!  Could that
be the cause of the problem?  (But, then, why did Eclipse discover the change with the same two tags??)  Anyway, I
figure if it doesn't have the T1 tag, let's just pick the branch point as the "From:" on the merge - this way all
changes on branch B1 would be considered for the merge.  But, again.  NB doesn't see any changes.

I exited the IDE, suspecting that it's instability of a nightly build.  Went to my trusty  6.5.1 version - even removed
$HOME/.netbeans and repeated the above.  Still nothing - Netbeans refuses to admit that this file has changed!

I gave up.  I needed to commit the changes because I was under time pressure.  Five minutes after announcing the
faux-pa, my manager replies to my e-mail with "When are you moving to Eclipse?"

This has happened before - but this is the first time that I caught it early enough to do the above research - usually,
I find out several days later from some developer: "hey, I thought you did a merge a few days ago - where are changes in
file X and Y?"  I would usually answer: maybe the files had a merge conflict and I accidentally made the wrong choices
during conflict resolution - sorry dude!"  But this time, I was able to see that the file wasn't even marked as a
changed file!

I marked this as a P1 because this problem can have pretty bad consequences: if QA doesn't do a regresssion in B2 on all
the bugs fixed in B1, they may never find that bugs are being re-introduced!

I'm not sure how I can help further: as I said, I had to fix the problem manually because of time pressure so now, of
course, the two branches are in sync :-(