merge vs pull

[Michael Ellerman]

On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:22, Martin Pool wrote:
> When should I use pull?
>
>   When you're keeping a local replica, mirror or backup of a branch stored
>   somewhere else.
>
> When should I use merge?
>
>   When you want to review and integrate changes, making a new revision
>   to show you did the merge.
>
> I can see it would be nice to have one less command and yet I think both
> use cases are valuable.

Absolutely. I think it's also useful to look at how people are likely to use 
bzr. In terms of merge/pull there's ~three classes of users:

 * Serious developers who branch, hack, merge, hack, remerge, branch, pull,
   push, tag, etc.
 * Budding/lazy developers, who track mainline and every now and then do some
   hacking.
 * Keen users who just want to track mainline.

Different projects will have different percentages of each, but as I see it 
for a lot of projects the latter category is going to be large.

My point is these users don't need to know about merge, they just want to grab 
the latest development code, try it out, and update it every now and then. If 
they need to merge then something's gone wrong.

In fact I think it would be cool to have a 'mirror' command, for exactly these 
kind of users. The first time you run mirror it would do a branch, on 
subsequent runs it would do a pull. So your doco for "how to track mainline" 
would be:

$ bzr mirror http://some.url.com/repo/path

Having such a command would I think make it _more_ feasible to combine merge 
and pull. That is, mirror would cater to most users, and to the simple use 
case. pull/merge could be reserved for more advanced users, and as such do 
more useful but perhaps slightly confusing logic.

cheers

-- 
Michael Ellerman
IBM OzLabs

email: michael:ellerman.id.au
inmsg: mpe:jabber.org
wwweb: http://michael.ellerman.id.au
phone: +61 2 6212 1183 (tie line 70 21183)

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors,
we borrow it from our children. - S.M.A.R.T Person
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20051128/d5b7e4f1/attachment.pgp