Question/idea about multiple developers committing to one branch

[Nicholas Allen]

Ok - here is what I think would be the ultimate solution to multiple 
developers pushing to a shared branch (in this case you almost never 
want the revision history to change order but bzr's default push 
behavior will do this soI think bzr really needs a simple way to prevent 
this happening).

Bzr needs a way to mark a branch as a shared branch - that is a branch 
that is pushed to by multiple developers. In the dumb file servers this 
would create a file in .bzr to indicate this. Perhaps a command like:

bzr shared branch-location

Then when a user tries to push to this branch location bzr will check if 
it is a shared branch or not. If it is and the push will change the 
order of revisions then it prints an error message:

bzr push mainline
Error: The destination branch location is a shared branch and your push 
will reorder the revisions. You should use a checkout/bound branch in 
order to commit changes to this location.
You can make this branch a bound branch by running 'bzr bind mainline'. 
You will then need to update your branch by running 'bzr update'. Then 
you can run bzr commit to commit your
changes to this location.

Then there would be no need for a --to option added to the merge 
command. This would also be something that could be implemented easily 
and would work even without smart server support on dumb file servers.

Cheers,

Nick