Repeated merges possible and displayed in brzr status

[Jan Hudec]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 04:17:01 -0400, James Blackwell wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 08:56:01AM +1000, Robert Collins wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 10:03 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> > 
> > > Though perhaps if a merge makes no file changes and pull would work, we
> > > should error out and suggest pull.
> > 
> > I would not error out, though suggesting pull is a good idea.
> > 
> > I.e. 
> > 'No changes have occured, your branch is synchronised with $URL and you
> > are able to pull.'
> > 
> > The reason I dont want an error is that merge and pull are semantically
> > different for the user, not just different in terms of mechanism. *I*
> 
> I know that I'm on the fringe with this, but I still think that
> a pull is the semantic equivilant of a very simple three way merge.
> 
> Better yet, since the tool can tell which one is right, then why
> complicate things for users such as the OP by making them learn the
> difference?

I personally prefer to think about 'pull' and 'merge' the way mercurial has
them -- pull brings over the changes from remote branch and merge takes all
heads* in current branch and merges them. This way they are completely
independent things.

Now for sake of simplicity, merge should imply pull. Head of given remote
branch is pulled from the remote branch and merged with local head. If the
remote head is decendant of the local head, the merge degenerates to just
applying the remote changes.

That way one could always use merge, but would use pull to have it fail if
merging would be required, but is not desired.

In fact, merge needs to imply pull, since Bazaar-NG, as is, does not allow
multiple heads in a branch, so the other head needs to be pulled in. (I still
think allowing multiple heads is useful sometimes, especially for
implementing shared storage).

--
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz>
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