tla-like changesets

[Aaron Bentley]

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Stefan Ring wrote:
>> We think merge directives are a better solution than changesets, because
>> they allow full merging, retaining history.  Merge directives are
>> generated with the "send" command.
> 
> They are nice IF you actually WANT to retain history AND the
> repositories are related.
> 
> I have two use cases where each of the preconditions is not met,
> respectively.
> 
> 1. Not retaining history -- when working in a repository with strict
> guidelines on the commit statements, I don't want to bother building
> such an elaborate text for every intermittent commit several times a
> day. So I just want to tweak and beat the thing into the final shape and
> only then commit to the official repo, with a single good and clean
> commit message. I also don't like cluttering the official repository
> with all those intermittent commits. I could do that with a changeset
> but not with a merge-directive.

Merge directives are a means of transmitting changes.  If you don't need
to transmit the changes, you don't need need an intermediate file at
all.  You just need a merge.  In this case, you would merge, then do
revert --forget-merges.

> 2. Non-related repositories -- our current repository has been started
> during a time when we experimented heavily with bzr, and several large
> files were added and removed several times, causing the repository to
> become quite large. We wanted to do a clean cut and restart the
> repository from scratch by exporting the last revision and importing it
> into a new repo (there was nothing of interest in the old commit history
> anyway). Now I happen to have a branch forked back then that I would
> eventually like to merge into the new repository. I cannot do this with
> a merge directive because the two are not related. I could quite easily
> do this with a changeset, though.

If your file-ids have changed, you could not do that with a tla-style
changeset.  If your file-ids have not changed, you can do a cherrypick
merge.

Aaron
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