[MERGE] Rule-based preferences (EOL part 1 of 3)

[Aaron Bentley]

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Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I'm probably sounding like a broken record, but in any case I'll restate
> that I think the Arch way was right:
> - treat it like a normal user file (w.r.t merging, changing,
>   committing, ...).
> - but place it somewhere inside the .bzr directory.

Do remember that several of bzr's designers are former Arch
contributors.  I found that Arch's way seemed very clever at first, but
it tended to break in the edge cases.

For me, the biggest example of this was Tom Lord deleting log files,
which were the main indicator of which revisions had been applied, from
the tla-dev.

Another was users' editing of those log files-- they would do this to
fix commit messages, or to change branch names.  But they usually did it
wrong-- they didn't update the corresponding archive logs, for example.

Another example was the log files themselves.  Their format for tag
revisions was ambiguous, but since their data was represented as files,
there was no way to update them without also changing the tree content.

Aaron
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