To merge or not to merge?

[Aaron Bentley]

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I thought I'd share an interesting dilemma: should I branch, merge or
pull?  I'm not sure what it says about our model that I'm confronting this.

I'm about to do some more hacking on the 'log' command.  I've got a
'log.perf' branch, which seems like the appropriate place to work.
Currently, my log work is shown as 'fully merged', which means that its
line in bzrk stops last Saturday.  If I merge bzr.dev, commit, and then
submit to PQM, that line will be added to the bzrk display for the past
week, and that display is already 10 lines wide, with 5 colour
repetitions.  So doing a merge is selfish-- it takes up a lot of space
in bzrk.  And in general, it makes visualization of the development
process trickier.  For continuing work, it would be necessary.  Since
it's not, I shouldn't.

In the old days, I could pull bzr.dev without throwing away my history.
 That would show nicely in bzrk, as a convergence and then a split.
Nowadays, it makes my branch basically indistinguishable from bzr.dev,
though the display in bzrk is basically unaffected.

Finally, I could start a new branch, of bzr.dev.  Maybe I'd set the nick
to log.perf, or maybe I'd just call the branch log.perf2.  But that
clutters my repository.

So for this case, I've decided to just pull.  I can't really envision a
use for my existing log.perf branch.  Anyone curious enough can just get
the revisions from bzr.dev.  Software archaeology can be fun, but you
can get too obsessive about these things.  Perhaps if we had tags, I'd
leave a tag on my log.perf last revision, but it's ultimately not such a
big deal.

Aaron
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