To merge or not to merge?

[Michael Ellerman]

On 6/23/06, Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> wrote:
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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.

I think you need a day off ;)

cheers