Question/idea about multiple developers committing to one branch

[Nicholas Allen]

> checkout % bzr merge
> checkout % bzr commit -m 'merge mainline'
> checkout % bzr push
> ERROR: the head of the push target is a merged revision of this branch:
> The head of the push target is 566.1.1 in this branch.
> You can use "bzr push --reorder" to overwrite the history of the push
> target.
> You can use "bzr bind" then "bzr update" and "bzr commit" to merge this
> branch into the push target without reordering the history of the target.
> checkout % bzr bind
> Turning this branch into a checkout of the push target:
> sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr.dev/bzr/bzr.dev
> checkout % bzr status
> Checkout has diverged. Use "bzr update" then "bzr commit" to merge your
> changes.
> checkout % bzr update
> Updated to revision 565.
> checkout % bzr commit -m 'a shiny feature'
>
> I hope I am not too confused about the behavior you expect.
>   
I think you have understood the behavior I expect very well ;-) I was 
just hoping there would be a way to do this without having to bind to 
the push location (so in a way I like your first suggestion more).

Ideally it would be nice if this could be done on a branch by branch 
basis and there would be no reordering of the parents at all. So the 
order of parents doesn't actually change but depending on which branch 
you are looking at it works out which parent represents the mainline of 
development for the branch you are looking at (which may be the first 
parent in one branch and the second in another). Not sure if this is 
even possible though?

There seems to be many ways to achieve the same thing. I think it is an 
important issue to tackle though and it should be as easy and intuitive 
as possible for the user. This allows them to just make a branch 
writable by other developers and be sure the revision numbers do not 
change. I really have no idea what the best solution is (especially from 
an implementation point of view as I am not familiar with the source 
code). Hopefully, the bzr developers will come up with a nice solution 
to this problem ;-)

Nick