Hi - I am still a bit confused about the difference between load vs. merge with Monticello?

Last month, when I tried to verify a bug fix, I did a load - and it caused other things (dependencies?) to be loaded into my clean image and so I ended up with something else in a broken state. So I had to do a Merge - get just the specific fixes and I could prove everything worked.

Yesterday however I wanted to test a fix Damien made for bug 13526. But when I Merged it, I hit a DNU and then noticed he had put the following comment (Slice .2 depends on 13787).

So I repeated the same merge step for 13787 and it then worked (apart from another edge case I found and he has now fixed).

But this has got me thinking, I don�t really understand the difference between merge/load. Can someone explain it to me in the above context? Should I have �loaded� 13526 so that it pulled in the dependency indicated? (I notice in the slice description - it shows - Dependencies: Tool-Base-DamienPollet.24). I thought Monticello managed dependencies - so now I�m confused why I need to do Merge anyway?

Related to this, when the next �release� image gets built - how are these slices assembled such that Tool-Base-DamienPollet.24 is correctly loaded in release image?

Thanks for any help.

Tim