[MERGE] Better progress reporting in commit

[Aaron Bentley]

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John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> A few comments...
> You again sent a bundle which cannot be applied without more context. So I'm
> unable to just "bzr merge bundle". I did apply the patch directly (patch -p0 <
> bundle). And I can say I like the reporter.

Ian,

I can kinda see where you're coming from, and I kinda can't.  You know
what happened last time, so you should know that bundles aren't supposed
to be used the way you're using them.

- - preferably, make your changes in a branch that has freshly branched
  from or merged bzr.dev.  That way, your changes are mergeable, either
  from your branch, or from a bundle generated the normal way.

- - if you can't do that, please send a diff and indicate where your
  branch is, and what revnos to merge from.  There is no point sending a
  bundle, because a bundle's extra metadata is unusable.

But on the other hand, I can see that it would be nice if you could
easily request a partial merge.  Here's my thought:

Let's give merge directives an additional "base_revision".  You'd then
be able to specify "bzr merge-directive -r6..7", and that would generate
a request to merge "6..7" precisely.  The diff shown in the merge
directive would be the diff from 6..7.  The bundle could contain all the
revisions that were necessary to construct 6 and 7, e.g. 5 and 4.
Whatever's not an ancestor of the target branch's last-revision.

Does that sound like a good approach?

Aaron
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