[BUG] No-op merge broken

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Martin Pool wrote:
> On 05/10/2006, at 21:39 , John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> 
>> I haven't tracked into it, but there was an old discussion on IRC that I
>> missed until today. Basically it mentioned that after merging and
>> committing, if you merge back into the other branch, you can commit
>> that, and ping-pong ad nauseum.
>>
>> I thought I remembered the second merge used to state 'Nothing to do.'
>>
>> I tried this with a copy of bzr-0.8, and it still created a no-change
>> merge, so if this an actual bug, it was made a while ago.
>>
>> Are we intending to add logic to avoid ping-pong merging? (I know we
>> have 'bzr pull' but that loses branch identity)
> 
> It's always worked this way.  The thing is that there really is
> something you can merge, being the other person's commit message etc. 
> It's perhaps not very interesting though.  Of course the person who
> merged might have changed something in their merge.
> 
> The original concept was that Bazaar will avoid ping-pong merges by
> providing push/pull.  As you say that now converges but isn't that the
> right thing to do?
> 
> Is something else really needed?
> 
> --Martin

Well, you lose branch identity with push/pull. Though in some sense,
that is what convergence means...

I think you only get into real issues when you have mesh merging. Where
there are > 2 branches that all are sort of at the same level. And even
there, probably pull is the best use case.

While it is nice that bzr supports mesh merging, etc, at some level
humans really like stars, because it manages the complexity that humans
have to deal with.

So for now, I'm fine with 'bzr pull', and it probably is what we should
be advocating for solving these problems.

John
=:->
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