Bzr bind/unbind ideas

[Nicholas Allen]

> 
>>> You would then use the update command (instead
>>> of the merge command) to update your branch from the push location. When
>>> you do so it would reorder the revisons in your branch so that the
>>> changes you made came after the ones at the push location (so your
>>> changes are added to the end of the revision history).
> 
> This is impossible as written.  A revision is a tree snapshot, and if it
> didn't contain the changes introduced by the last upstream version, it
> can't appear after he last upstream version.

But bzr can already do this (or something very similar). If I have a
branch that I want to push to a location but the push would change the
order of revisions I can prevent this now by creating a new branch from
the location I wish to push to and then merge the other branch into this
new branch and push from that branch instead. The changes made in the
original branch now appear after the ones in the push location which is
what I want to achieve.

So all I am suggesting is that bzr makes this an easier process by not
requiring you to manually create another branch. I can't see much
advantage to reordering revisions on a push. To me this always seems
undesirable and the advantage of preventing this is that you get the
centralised model without even needing bind/unbind or checkout and
without loosing any of the benefits of the distributed model. Those
commands would just exist to make the process more convenient and smoother.

But I would be happy if bzr provides a simple way to do this and whether
this is by setting a flag or just always preventing it on a push doesn't
really matter. As long as bzr has a simple way to make a branch shared
amongst multiple developers so that the revision order does not change
then that is the main thing...

Nick