[BUG] Merging an MD into a different branch causes a cherrypick
John Arbash Meinel
john at arbash-meinel.com
Fri Nov 2 21:25:52 GMT 2007
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Aaron Bentley wrote:
...
>
> No, it is because I spent a bunch of time trying to decide what should
> happen, and now, based on one experience, you've gone and marked it
> wrong and bad before even bothering to discuss it, or find out what the
> actual behavior is. It's not nice or polite.
I'm genuinely sorry if you feel offended. It was certainly not a "this is bad".
Certainly it didn't conform to my expectations, but I can follow some of your
reasoning.
In general, I think of MDs as being a replacement for using Branches. I think
you have a very good point with:
...
> In particular, the person applying a merge directive is rarely the
> person who created it, and they will tend to be less familiar with the
> revision history. They will tend to want to apply the changes present
> in the merge directive, but won't necessarily be interested in whatever
> other changes are present in the branch. They will need to rely on the
> directive's base selection, because they can't easily make their own.
>
> Because the person applying the directive is not the creator, they will
> probably assess the value of the patch based on the preview. This is
> why I want the preview to be an accurate indicator, so that people can
> trust it. I am okay with it showing *more* changes than would actually
> be performed, but I am not okay with it showing *fewer*.
>
> Aaron
I would *like* to be able to use MDs as a branch replacement without having to
create a local branch and "bzr pull --overwrite ../patch". And it was, in fact,
how Bundles worked. So when MDs worked differently, it seemed like a bug.
I think you have some very good points, especially wrt people with less than
intimate knowledge of their tools.
At the very least, there is a bug that it isn't informing me it is doing a
cherry pick. As trying to figure out why "bzr merge ../patch" was causing lots
of conflicts, while "bzr merge ../branch" was working just fine. It took me a
bit of digging to find that MDs implicitly set a base revision.
Or maybe it is just a documentation issue. Certainly at a minimum the "bzr
send" documentation should include an explicit "to incorporate these changes
use "bzr merge"". There is a "See also: merge", but "merge" doesn't say
anything about how to merge an MD. That is probably a different bug, though.
Also, I certainly think your decisions should be documented. Perhaps in
"doc/en/user-reference/merge-directives.txt" or maybe "bzr help merge-directives.
John
=:->
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