[RFC] A bit of lovin for tags

[Russ Brown]

John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> At the moment, if someone changes a tag to point at a new revision, the
> propagation and conflict resolution is a bit difficult.
> 
> Specifically, when you pull someone else's changes, it just says
> "Conflicting tags:XXX". Which is a bit short, and doesn't really tell
> you if the other work succeeded or failed, or how to resolve these
> conflicting tags.
> 
> Also, if the tags were versioned, we would be able to detect that this
> is a simple supersede of the earlier tag value.
> 
> chadmiller on IRC suggests this warning text:
> 
> "Your %(verb)s completed, but upstream disagrees about which revisions
> these tags should appear on.  Your tags were not updated.  Conflicts:\n"
> 
> 
> I don't think we can do a lot more than give friendlier messages until
> we decide to version tags. And I don't think we have any UI for actually
> getting the new values, except for maybe a 'pull --force'?
> 
> (The fact I don't know is probably telling.)
> 
> John
> =:->
> 

I had this problem today, and was able to solve it by using bzr tag
--force at my end. However, that required knowing what version the tag
had been moved to upstream, which was not available in the 'conflicting
tags' error message.

I could have run bzr log on the remote branch, or (as happened in this
case) asked the person who moved the tag, but I think it would be a good
start to just output the revision number in question in the error
message, and suggest that bzr tag --force could be used to update the
tag locally.

I think that would be a good start.

-- 

Russ.