partial commit with conflicts

[Martin Pool]

On 21 May 2006, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> I'm working on doing some refactoring, and it causes quite a few
> conflicts. In the process, I would like to be able to commit the few
> things as I am able to resolve them. For example, I merged another tree,
>  and I want to commit 'bzrlib/builtins.py' because I fixed it, but I
> didn't want to wait until I resolved all of the other conflicts (because
> some of them will be rather involved).
> 
> I'm just wondering what repercussions this would cause, and whether we
> want to support it at all. (Right now I'm not sure that we allow partial
> commit when you have pending-merges either).
> 
> I can understand the need to have everything resolved so that the merge
> operator knows that everything was fixed. (Otherwise you would end up
> with some files that don't get the proper ancestry).
> 
> Anyway, just something I was trying to do, and wondering if anyone
> thinks it might be worth implementing.

I think it would be useful, and I don't see any conceptual reason why it
can't be done now.  You should be able to just check whether the
particular files affected by the merge are in the conflict list.  It
will need some care with commits covering a directory where the
directory is conflicted.

Partial commit of merges can also be done and would be very nice.  It
may require somewhat larger changes; you need to make sure to take the
per-file parents for the files being committed, but carry all the other
files over from the previous version.  Actually it's probably not all
that hard.

-- 
Martin