[RFC][PATCH] New options to choose fast-forwarding on merge.

[Jan Hudec]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 12:45:18PM -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
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> Jari Aalto wrote:
> > It would be good is this behaviour could be be configured permanently
> > in the bzr configuration file. I'can't think any case for myself not
> > wanting always to do "pull --merge".
> 
> There were two reasons:
> 1. consistency: It's simpler to say "you never need to commit after a
> pull, you always need to commit after a merge".  Saying "If pull falls
> back to a merge, you need to commit" is messier.
> 
> 2. mirroring: I do 'bzr pull' in a mirror of bzr.dev, it should never
> report "branches are diverged".  If it does, I must have screwed up and
> committed to my local bzr.dev mirror.  Falling back to merge isn't
> helpful here; I want an error.

That's why I did merge --pull and not pull --merge.

pull, defined informally as 'update this to be copy of that branch' does
not make sense to have --merge option. Besides it would have to get all
the other options merge has etc.

On the other hand merge, defined informally as 'get changes from there
over here' does make sense to have an option to not create new revisions
if it's not necessary, thus --pull makes sense there. Besides pull is
simple, so adding merge --pull does not require adding any more options
and minimum complexity (the actual implementation is about 10 lines).

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                  				- Jan Hudec `Bulb' <bulb at ucw.cz>