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

[Aaron Bentley]

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Jan Hudec wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 12:45:18PM -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:

>>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.

For 1, the same inconsistency argument applies to "merge --pull" as
"pull --merge".

And as I noted, 2 is weaker these days.  So I don't think these are good
arguments in favour of your choice.

> pull, defined informally as 'update this to be copy of that branch' does
> not make sense to have --merge option.

Ah, but I do want pull --merge, much more than I want merge --pull.
Every now and then I want to merge in a non-mirror, but I never ever
want to pull in a non-mirror branch.

> 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

When we decided to make pull rewrite the history, instead of merely
appending to it, we were deciding against using pull as a merge tool.

The old pull did not throw away the local view of history.  The new pull
does, and I don't think people expect *any* merge option to cause their
local view to be lost.  Even if we did provide it, I would think we
would need provide a way for people to undo it.

Aaron
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